Slackjaw’s Top 10 of 2019

Our most-read pieces of the year, plus some of our personal, under-the-radar favorites

Slackjaw readers! You have voted with your mice! With no ado whatsoever, here are our top ten most-read humor pieces of 2019…

1. New — It’s Adjunct Barbie™! by Katie Burgess
2. 26 Easy Steps To Making Friends In A New City by Emily Clouse
3. Welcome To The United Airlines Economy Minus Program by Dustin Holloway
4. An Open Letter To The Teacher Who Gave Me A “D” On The Essay I Wrote For My Son by Jennifer Walker
5. Jeff Bezos’s Lazy Saturday Morning Routine by Molly Henderson
6. Meet The Agents Who Will Decline To Represent Your Debut Novel by Amy Drayer
7. 12 Totally True Myths About Redheads by Sarah Hutto
8. Ernest Hemingway At The Taco Bell Cantina by Jude Flannelly
9. I’m Your About-To-Be-Born Baby, And Here’s All The Ways My Birth Will Terrify You Two Idiots by Chris Knight
10. I’m 45 but I Date Millennials! by Mike Sacks

Editor’s Picks: Under-The-Radar Instant Classics

And here are ten more pieces that we loved and thought deserved many more views…

1. Edgar Allan Poe Shops For a New House by Keaton Patti. The character voice in this one is perfect. But character pieces still need strong jokes, and this one has them in spades, from Poe’s obsession with how many ravens he can fit in a study, to his using human skulls as business cards. Bleak perfection.
2. Is Everybody Mad That I Ate (a Variety of Eggs for) Lunch at My Desk? by Emily Clouse. An odd situation with great comic heightening, this one totally charmed us. The narrator’s describing her five eggs as “working-lunch eggs” is just the best.
3. Miniature Father Found In Man’s Head by David Farr. Flash fiction wizard David Farr gave us several gems in 2019, but this one stood out as using an odd premise — and taking it literally, to great effect— to tell an emotionally-relatable comic story about an internal voice of insecurity.
4. Welcome To My Clown Doll Museum by Libby Marshall. A creepy monologue with great comedic details, the narrator is an elderly ex-telephone-line repair man described as resembling a “threatening Santa Claus.” We loved the way this one slyly lets us in on the narrator’s mental states, without giving away too much e.g. “Take a look around. It’s the same painted clown face over and over again, but with tiny variations only I care about.”
5. The Old Spaghetti Factory Briefly Considers a Branding Overhaul by Tom Ellison. Sometimes all it takes is focusing intently on a single phrase — like “Old Spaghetti Factory” —and putting it under the microscope. It makes us too think of “the ghost of a Dickensian child, covered in soot and marinara sauce, who was crushed to death in the hellish gears of a spaghetti assembly line”
6. A Definitely Qualified Astronaut Looking For Work by Marcela Onyango Who among us hasn’t read a few articles or watched a few TV episodes about some wild occupation and thought, “I could do that!” The delusion of this extremely qualified narrator makes for a great read. And hey, maybe he could join the Space Force.
7. I Am a Giant Peach and I Am Here to Draft All the Jameses by Amanda Pastunink. A supremely goofy piece that succeeds on the narrator’s giddiness: a Giant Peach that wants to draft all the James’s, plus all the “Jims, Jimmys, and Jimbos.” Calling out the obvious nod to Roald Dahl makes it all somehow even funnier: “A giant peach and a James…together? Not this old song and dance.”
8. How to Convince Your Friend that Feet Exist by Murad Awan. A great example of a piece that shines through the narrator’s relentless idiot logic. Overall, a very clever and silly piece and just a little reminiscent, in the funniest way, of actual philosophical debates.
9. Creative Photo Ideas For Your Favorite Inspirational Quotes by Lindsey Adams. This piece should win over those who love dark, twisted satire. Well, it won us over. Also a nice example of how revealing bizarre details one-at-a-time is sometimes funnier than seeing them all at once. Read it to the end!
10. How to Woo According to Bonnie Raitt’s Music Video ‘Thing Called Love’ by Amy Morrison. Any piece that simply pays extra, super-close attention to a Bonnie Raitt music video from the 80s — and describes it in way too much detail — is a winner in our book.

Thanks to all of our Slackjaw writers for the LOLs. And thanks to you for reading and following along. See ya in 2020!

Your editors,
Alex Baia, sarah james, and Matthew McConaughey