HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories
HumorUs is a comedy fiction podcast that presents classic and original funny short stories, narrated by professional voice actor Don McDonald. Each episode features a single tale, ranging from humorous pieces by authors like Ellis Parker Butler, O. Henry, and W.W. Jacobs to new stories. The show explores timeless humor, proving that a good laugh never goes out of print. It is produced by Short Storyverses, with all episodes narrated with a touch of wit and charm.
Episodes
The Eyes Have It — A Classic Tale by Philip K. Dick
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 P
The Romance of a Busy Broker — A Classic Humorus Story by O. Henry
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
Tobermory — A Classic Short Story by Saki
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
A Foot Too Deep — An Original Short Story by Don McDonald
Nobody in New Orleans had ever made Bernard de Marigny look foolish in public. He was rich past counting, small as a foil, and very likely the most dangerous man in Louisiana with a pistol in his hand. Then a blacksmith from a far parish, seven feet of him and slow to speak, said something true on the floor of the legislature, and the whole chamber laughed.The card came to the forge two days later
A Slice of Life — A Classic Story by P.G. Wodehouse
A man in a country pub insists his story is true. It concerns his brother Wilfred, a chemist of some genius, a jolly outdoor girl with a wholesome sunburn, and a Yorkshire baronet who spells his name with four small f's. Somebody is being kept behind a locked door on the second floor. Somebody else is about to regret asking what's true to life.This is P.G. Wodehouse, 1926, at his most gleefully un
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain
An errand, a name, a question. That's all it takes.Sent east to west on a friend's behalf, a traveler walks into a decayed mining camp in Calaveras County and asks one polite question of one agreeable old man. He is then backed into a corner, blockaded there with a chair, and told at enormous length about Jim Smiley, a gambler who would bet on a horse race, a dog fight, a camp meeting, or two bird
The Reticence of Lady Anne — A Classic Short Story by Saki
A December afternoon, a fire going down, and a marriage stalled halfway through a quarrel nobody bothered to finish. Egbert comes in for tea prepared to be reasonable, then conciliatory, then almost penitent. Lady Anne, rigid in the armchair by the tea table, declines to participate. Somewhere above them a bullfinch works through the only tune it knows, and on the rug a Persian cat named Don Tarqu
Gipsy — A Classic Comic Tale by Booth Tarkington
Duke is a little old dog with a pessimistic worldview and a well-earned suspicion that life rarely improves. Gipsy is a rangy, scarred, yellow-eyed stray cat who lives by his own code and has never met a creature he could not intimidate. When Gipsy helps himself to a fishbone resting near Duke's sleeping nose, the afternoon explodes into a comic war of nerves, claws, and theatrical yelping that dr
A Wasted Day — A Classic Short Story by Richard Harding Davis
Arnold Thorndike buys a Correggio before breakfast and can price his own time to the minute. Two hundred dollars of it. So when he stops his car at the Court of General Sessions to say a word for a young stenographer who got drunk, lost five hundred dollars of his employer's money, and is due up for sentence, he figures the errand will run him about a thousand.The court has other ideas. Richard Ha
The Whirligig of Life — A Classic Short Tale by O. Henry
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
Chain of Custody — An Original Comedy of Errors by Don McDonald
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 s
The Good Little Boy and The Bad Little Boy by Mark Twain
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, Th
The Nice People — A Classic Humorous Story by H.C. Brunner
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 magaz
Memoirs of a Yellow Dog — A Classic Humorous Tale by O. Henry
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 stra
The Committee Committee – An Original Short Story by Don McDonald
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..Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDon
Forever Fun
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.Despite a few suspicious reviews, every story you hear is narrated by an actual human—me, Don McDonald. If you enjoy the show, please rate it five stars and help me prove I’m not AI—which is, admittedly, exactly what AI would ask you to do. Hosted
The Great American Pie Company — Classic Humor by Ellis Parker Butler
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
My Financial Career — A Short Classic Humorous Tale by Stephen Leacock
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
The £1,000,000 Bank-Note — A Classic Tale by Mark Twain
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
Nevada Funeral – Scotty Briggs and the Clergyman by Mark Twain
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
Eve's Diary — Translated from the Original by Mark Twain
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, rema
Excerpts from Adam's Diary by Mark Twain
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
The Baker's Dozen — A Humorous Playlet by Saki
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
Pigs is Pigs — A Classic Farce by Ellis Parker Butler
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
Two Hearts Beat As One — A Classic Story by Frank Norris
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
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