Adam Mansbach (previously) will write a blurb of your novel. For a price.... [more inside]
posted by schmod on Apr 18, 2012 - 23 comments

Are you feeling blue? Suffer from insomnia? Need career advice? Have dietary concerns? Want to know more about sex? Wonder how the market is doing and your finances? Never fear, Sweet Old Bob is here
posted by timsteil on Oct 10, 2010 - 15 comments

Scans of all three issues of Army Man Magazine, the legendary late 80s humor zine put together by future Simpsons' writer George Meyer (an excellent New Yorker profile of Meyer) which also included material from Jack Handey, John Swartzwelder, Bob Odenkirk, among many others. Another contributor, Ian Frazier, talks about Army Man in a Believer Interview. Sadly the scans are small (but the jokes are still big) and of poor quality. For a non-eyestraining introduction, Maud Newton transcribed a good bit of material and posted it at the end of an appreciation of Army Man on her blog.
posted by Kattullus on Mar 17, 2010 - 25 comments

"Did you see the politics? It made me angry." Conversations by Grownups As Imagined By Kids.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders on Mar 20, 2007 - 36 comments

A man, just back from a trip abroad, went to an incompetent fortune-teller. He asked about his family, and the fortune-teller replied: "Everyone is fine, especially your father." When the man objected that his father had been dead for ten years, the reply came: "You have no clue who your real father is."--that's one of the jokes from The Laughter Lover (Philogelos), an ancient Greek joke book published in the 4th or 5th century AD. The New Yorker commented on it, and other old jokes here, stating about one of the possible authors: ... there is some scholarly speculation that the Hierocles in question was a fifth-century Alexandrian philosopher of that name who was once publicly flogged in Constantinople for paganism, which, as one classicist has observed, “might have given him a taste for mordant wit.”
posted by amberglow on Jul 10, 2004 - 12 comments

Captionistas Wanted: This year's New Yorker cartoon competition, slightly more challenging than last year's is now online, awaiting witty captions until November 20.
posted by MiguelCardoso on Nov 4, 2002 - 48 comments

"Babe Ruth and I were teammates on the Yankees—and lovers, too. It was no big deal back then. After Sunday games were over, lots of players and writers would come by our little flat in the Morrisania section of the Bronx for one of Babe's famous bean dinners. I also remember the evening when Babe, wearing his familiar pink housecoat, turned out a nice catfish stew for Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Everyone in baseball knew how it was with me and Babe. After the company had gone home and we'd done the dishes, he would lie in my arms and I'd whisper, 'You are my bambino.'"
posted by semmi on Jun 30, 2002 - 9 comments