HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories

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.

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 i...

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 piec...

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 tu...

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, an...

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, rem...

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...

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, wit...

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 l...

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...

A man meets his Conscience face to face, and decides the world would be a far pleasanter place without it. Mark Twain's 1876 satire "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" turns guilt into a grotesque little houseguest and moral improvement into a spree. Sharp, absurd, and surprisingly modern in its contempt for performative virtue. Originally recorded by Don McDonald in...