If I drew up a list of the most popular and productive newspaper writers of the last four decades, high on that list would be Dave Barry. He built an international reputation as a humorist, writing ...

You can't force funny writing. It helps to look for the absurdities in everyday life, make fun of yourself and, like the best comedians, learn how to set up the punch line. When we recently polled our ...

Some writers are born funny. Others become funny. And still others have funny thrust upon them. Then there are others, like my long-time colleague Don Fry, who want to be funny so bad that they would ...

Remember the “noogie?” If you lived during the 1970s, you do. The noogie was popularized on “Saturday Night Live” by ultra-nerds Todd DiLaMuca and Lisa Lupner, played by Bill Murray and Gilda Radner.

Literature at its most serious is almost always funny. It’s hard to name an authentic great—Dickens, Faulkner, Zadie Smith—who’s not a gifted comic, too. In our conversation for this series, Sean ...

The American family novel has been through countless iterations, and Joshua Ferris' latest book is bringing the genre fully into modern times. In A Calling for Charlie Barnes (out now), the National ...

With the rise of women like Amy Schumer, Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler, Leslie Jones, and Kirsten Wiig, we’re seeing women in comedy shining in the spotlight and fighting the lame stereotype that women ...

Louise Erdrich's 15th novel, "LaRose," entwines such weighty themes as war, family, adoption, death, grief, the Indian Child Welfare Act, reservation boarding schools, Indian culture and myth, and ...