HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories

Four young men from the city, a campfire in the Sullivan County hills, and one small man who can’t stop talking about the black hole in the hillside. He wants a story to take home. His friends want him in front. Stephen Crane was twenty when he wrote this, years before The Red Badge of Courage, and he’s having a wonderful time at his own expense: thunderous prose, a cave dripping with gothic dread, and four bold adventurers who would very much like to be somewhere else.

Check out our multiverses of short fiction podcasts at shortstoryverses.com.
HumorUs is no longer adding stories. You’ll find these same tales, along with my latest narrations, on LitReading—where it all started. Search for LitReading in your podcast app and follow the show there.
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Mark Twain falls into conversation with a pleasant gentleman who has mild opinions on weather, crops, literature, scandal and religion. Then the talk lands on burglar alarms, and the gentleman is suddenly not mild at all. His was the most imposing alarm in America. It had a gong the size of a washbowl, forty-seven little tags, and an expert from New York who always came when called, and always remembered to send a bill. Twain, who had an alarm put into his own Hartford house the year before he wrote this, lets the man talk.

First published in Harper’s Christmas supplement, December 1882.
HumorUs is no longer adding stories. You’ll find these same tales, along with my latest narrations, on LitReading—where it all started. Search for LitReading in your podcast app and follow the show there.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Somebody left a paperback on the bus. A man brings it home, settles into his easy-chair, and makes a discovery the rest of us have missed: Earth has been invaded, and the author knows all about it. The proof is right there on the page, and it gets worse with every chapter. He wrote to the Government. They sent back a pamphlet on the repair and maintenance of frame houses.

A comic gem from 1953 by Philip K. Dick, the mind behind Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report.

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This show is one corner of Short Storyverses, a family of fiction podcasts. Some lean literary. Some are funny. Some will keep you up with the lights on, and some belong by the fire in December. There are classics nobody reads anymore and should, and original stories you won't hear anywhere else. They're all read by Don McDonald from his studio booth, and all short enough to finish on a drive, a walk, or a sleepless night.

Come explore at shortstoryverses.com. Pick a universe. Stay a while.
HumorUs is no longer adding stories. You’ll find these same tales, along with my latest narrations, on LitReading—where it all started. Search for LitReading in your podcast app and follow the show there.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Wall Street, a spring morning at the turn of the century. The ticker is running hot, the telephone won’t quit, and Harvey Maxwell, broker, is handling it all like a man with springs where his heart should be. His clerk thinks the boss is slipping. His stenographer has something on her mind. Then a window opens, and somebody on the Exchange starts clubbing the stuffing out of Union Pacific.

O. Henry at full gallop, in a nine-minute comedy from The Four Million, read by Don McDonald.

HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network of fiction podcasts. More stories, more feeds, at shortstoryverses.com.
HumorUs is no longer adding stories. You’ll find these same tales, along with my latest narrations, on LitReading—where it all started. Search for LitReading in your podcast app and follow the show there.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every house party has a guest who knows too much.

A mild little man named Cornelius Appin has spent seventeen years on one problem. He believes he's solved it: he has taught a cat to speak. The company around Lady Blemley's tea table does not believe him — and that, as it happens, is the last comfortable moment anyone in the house will enjoy.

Pour yourself some tea. Mind the saucer.

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), the sharpest wit of the Edwardian age. Born in Burma and raised in Devon by a grandmother and two aunts he could not abide, he became a foreign correspondent before turning his pen on polite society. He borrowed his pen name from the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. When war came in 1914, he enlisted as a private at forty-three and refused a commission; he was killed by a sniper in France on November 14, 1916. His last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out.”

“Tobermory” first appeared in the Westminster Gazette in 1909 and was collected in The Chronicles of Clovis in 1911.

Read by Don McDonald. HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com

If you enjoyed this one, tell a friend, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave a review. It genuinely helps. Also, check out my multiple short story universes at shortstoryverses.com

Find more stories at ShortStoryverses.com — a multiverse of audio fiction spanning seven shows: classics on LitReading, original voices on New Tales Told, children's stories on Readastorus, holiday tales on Season's Readings, horror on FRIGHTLY!, romance on Love Lit, and comedy on HumorUs. Every story sized to fit a commute, a walk, or the quiet stretch before sleep. We have stories buried everywhere.
HumorUs is no longer adding stories. You’ll find these same tales, along with my latest narrations, on LitReading—where it all started. Search for LitReading in your podcast app and follow the show there.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.