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HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories
16 episodes
The Whirligig of Life — A Classic Short Tale by O. Henry
Aug 11, 2026 · 14 min
Ransie and Ariela Bilbro come down out of the Cumberland Mountains to have their marriage undone. Justice of the Peace Benaja Widdup can find no law on the subject, so he invents one, and prices it at five dollars, which happens to be every cent Ransie made on his furs. Then Ariela wants alimony. What follows is a night ride, a masked man, a bill rolled tight and pushed down a rifle barrel, and a decree that nobody much wants by morning. O. Henry watches a single five-dollar bill travel in a per…
Chain of Custody — An Original Comedy of Errors by Don McDonald
Aug 4, 2026 · 19 min
In Maple Glen, nothing ever happens. This week, nothing happens in three separate backyards, after dark, and everyone involved would prefer you didn't ask. A deadpan comedy about honesty, neighbors, and one very patient dog. 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 Li…
The Good Little Boy and The Bad Little Boy by Mark Twain
Jul 28, 2026 · 18 min
Mark Twain had a bone to pick with the Sunday-school storybook — that pious little genre where good children are showered with rewards and bad children are struck by lightning, broken by apple trees, and buried under weeping relatives by the final page. So he wrote two stories to set the record straight. In this paired episode we run both, back-to-back, framed like an old-time radio hour. First, The Story of the Good Little Boy: meet Jacob Blivens, who obeys his parents, learns his book, never p…
The Nice People — A Classic Humorous Story by H.C. Brunner
Jul 21, 2026 · 22 min
Atop Orange Mountain, in Mr. Jacobus's summer boarding house, a bored married couple finds relief from their tiresome fellow guests in the arrival of the Bredes — a graceful, good-looking young pair who seem, in every visible way, to be "nice people." But their charming small talk keeps springing leaks. Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855–1896) was a poet, novelist, and the longtime editor of the humor magazine *Puck*, celebrated for polished short stories that find real feeling inside social comedy. "The…
Memoirs of a Yellow Dog — A Classic Humorous Tale by O. Henry
Jul 16, 2026 · 12 min
O. Henry usually saves his surprises for the last line. This time he starts with one: the narrator is a dog. In *The Memoirs of a Yellow Dog*, a mangy, good-natured mutt gives us his candid review of apartment life, married humans, and the fine art of knowing when it's time to go. Wry, tender, and very funny — it's a small classic told from just below the dinner table. Few writers could make a stray dog sound this much like a philosopher. O. Henry's yellow dog sees his humans clearly, loves them…
The Committee Committee – An Original Short Story by Don McDonald
Jul 13, 2026 · 17 min
This is a parable set in a village where things run smoothly—because they always have. Problems are addressed. Responsibilities are shared. And when questions arise, there is a structure in place to handle them. Over time, that structure has grown more refined, more comprehensive… and more ridiculous.. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Forever Fun
Jul 9, 2026 · 1 min
Some stories ask you to believe. These just want to humor us. Here's a narrated collection of short fiction with a straight face and a crooked grin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Great American Pie Company — Classic Humor by Ellis Parker Butler
Jul 2, 2026 · 27 min
Eph Deacon sells pies for a living, or rather his wife bakes them and he carries the basket, which suits his philosophy just fine. Then Phineas Doolittle starts undercutting him from across the river, and what begins as a squabble on a bridge turns into something much bigger, and much sillier. Before long the two men have talked themselves into buying up farms, bakeries, and even a railroad, all in the name of cornering the pie market once and for all. Ellis Parker Butler, the man who gave the w…
My Financial Career — A Short Classic Humorous Tale by Stephen Leacock
Jul 2, 2026 · 7 min
He only wants to open an account. That's all. Fifty-six dollars, a polite request, and maybe two minutes of a bank manager's time. But the moment our narrator steps inside the building, something happens to his brain, and every word that comes out of his mouth makes the situation worse. Stephen Leacock built an entire career on watching ordinary people crumble under ordinary pressure, and few pieces do it faster, or funnier, than this one. Stephen Leacock was a Canadian economist, political scie…
The £1,000,000 Bank-Note — A Classic Tale by Mark Twain
Jul 1, 2026 · 45 min
Henry Adams has one dollar to his name, a coat gone thin at the elbows, and a hunger that's stopped being polite about it. Then two rich old brothers hand him an envelope and vanish for thirty days, leaving him holding the single strangest piece of paper in London. It isn't counterfeit. It isn't a joke. And it is worth more than Henry can spend, prove, or even safely admit to owning. Mark Twain turns a penniless clerk loose on Victorian high society and lets the absurdity do exactly what it want…
Nevada Funeral – Scotty Briggs and the Clergyman by Mark Twain
Jul 1, 2026 · 11 min
Out in the Nevada mining camps of the 1870s, men learned to speak a language all their own, part slang, part swagger, part pure invention, and woe to the outsider who couldn't keep up. When a rough-hewn miner named Scotty Briggs marches into town to fetch a proper burial for a fallen friend, he finds himself face to face with a young, freshly minted clergyman who speaks only the King's English, and neither man has the faintest idea what the other is talking about. What follows is one of Mark Twa…
Eve's Diary — Translated from the Original by Mark Twain
Jul 1, 2026 · 42 min
Where Adam's diary gave us one grumpy, bewildered account of those first days in Eden, Twain gives Eve her own version, and it changes everything. She's curious about everything, endlessly talkative, and cheerfully certain she's right about most of it. It's Twain at his funniest, and, by the end, at his most tender. This one will surprise you. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voices, celebrated for wit as sharp as his social criti…
Excerpts from Adam's Diary by Mark Twain
Jul 1, 2026 · 27 min
Before there was marriage counseling, there was Adam's diary. Mark Twain's comic monologue imagines the Garden of Eden's first resident keeping a running, increasingly exasperated account of the strange new creature who's moved in, started naming his animals, and rewritten the rules of the place without asking. It's Genesis as domestic comedy, and it's every bit as sharp as Twain at his best. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voice…
The Baker's Dozen — A Humorous Playlet by Saki
Jul 1, 2026 · 12 min
Major Richard Dumbarton and Emily Carewe haven't seen each other in years, not since old grudges and other marriages got in the way. A chance reunion aboard an eastward-bound steamer changes that fast, deck chairs bribed into place and all. But romance runs into arithmetic when the subject of children comes up, and the resulting scramble to make the numbers work is pure Saki mischief. A quick, witty shipboard farce about love, superstition, and creative counting. Hector Hugh Munro, better known…
Pigs is Pigs — A Classic Farce by Ellis Parker Butler
Jul 1, 2026 · 22 min
This story a small masterpiece of exasperation from 1905. Ellis Parker Butler wrote "Pigs Is Pigs" as a jab at corporate red tape, and somehow, more than a hundred years on, it has only gotten funnier. Two guinea pigs arrive at a railway express office. A clerk named Mike Flannery decides they are pigs, the customer insists they are pets, and a single nickel of disagreement sets off a cascade of letters, departments, and, well, arithmetic. You'll see. Ellis Parker Butler, 1869 to 1937, was one o…
Two Hearts Beat As One — A Classic Story by Frank Norris
Jun 30, 2026 · 28 min
Frank Norris could grind a man down to nothing in three hundred naturalist pages. He could also, when the rent was due, write something this loose and this funny. "Two Hearts That Beat as One" sends two soldiers of fortune, one American, one English, gunrunning down the Pacific coast, where they make the oldest mistake there is and fall for the same woman. The cure they settle on is a boxing match. It does not cure them. Frank Norris was thirty-two when he died, in 1902, which is the kind of fac…
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