Free Daily Podcast Summary
HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Don McDonald
Classic Tales and New Laughs from Twain to Today Comedy is the oldest trick in the book (or the short story), and HumorUs goes digging for the funniest classic tales with a few new ones sprinkled in. Each episode is one short story, narrated with care and a raised eyebrow. Bureaucratic guinea pigs that simply will not stop multiplying, courtesy of Ellis Parker Butler. A backwoods divorce that doubles right back into a wedding, by way of O. Henry. A shipwreck that strands exactly the wrong man, from the dry wit of W.W. Jacobs. A town so devoted to oversight it forms a committee to oversee the committees. Some of these tales are a hundred years old. Some are brand new. All of them prove the same stubborn little fact, that a good laugh never goes out of print. So pour something, settle in, and let the great humorists, famous and forgotten alike, humor us. All episodes are narrated by professional voice actor, Don McDonald.
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- Yesterday10 min
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 at full gallop, in a nine-minute comedy from The Four Million, read by Don McDonald.HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network of fiction podcasts. More stories, more feeds, at shortstoryverses.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 1 weeks ago19 min
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 the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), the sharpest wit of the Edwardian age. Born in Burma and raised in Devon by a grandmother and two aunts he could not abide, he became a foreign correspondent before turning his pen on polite society. He borrowed his pen name from the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. When war came in 1914, he enlisted as a private at forty-three and refused a commission; he was killed by a sniper in France on November 14, 1916. His last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out.”“Tobermory” first appeared in the Westminster Gazette in 1909 and was collected in The Chronicles of Clovis in 1911.Read by Don McDonald. HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.comIf you enjoyed this one, tell a friend, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave a review. It genuinely helps. Also, check out my multiple short story universes at shortstoryverses.comFind 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 Lit, and comedy on HumorUs. Every story sized to fit a commute, a walk, or the quiet stretch before sleep. We have stories buried everywhere. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 2 weeks ago14 min
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.The blacksmith was no duelist. He was, however, a man who had spent his life learning where something hard gives.From Short Storyverses. More at shortstoryverses.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 3 weeks ago36 min
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 unreliable.First published in Liberty, August 7, 1926; collected in Meet Mr. Mulliner, 1927. Read by Don McDonald. HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- 4 weeks ago15 min
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 birds on a fence, and who once spent three solid months in his back yard teaching a frog to jump.The frog's name was Dan'l Webster. He was, by every account, the finest jumper in the county.Then a stranger came through camp.Mark Twain published this in the fall of 1865 and woke up famous. Sixty years of American humor start here, on a barroom floor, with forty dollars on the line.Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in Missouri in 1835. Printer's devil, riverboat pilot, and, briefly and disastrously, a silver prospector. He went west in 1861 chasing a fortune he never found, and came back with something better, which was a way of hearing how Americans actually talked.He heard this story in a tavern in Angels Camp in the winter of 1865, wrote it down, and watched it run in a New York paper that November. It was reprinted everywhere, pirated almost as fast, and read aloud in parlors and barrooms coast to coast. He was thirty and unknown that fall. By spring he was Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer was still eleven years away.If you enjoyed this one, tell a friend, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave a review. It genuinely helps. Also, check out my multiple short story universes at shortstoryverses.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Sep 1, 20269 min
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 Tarquinio waits with the patience of an animal who has already decided something.Saki at his most precise: eleven minutes of drawing-room comedy built entirely out of one person not speaking, and a closing line that reorganizes everything you just heard."The Reticence of Lady Anne" was collected in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910). Read by Don McDonald.Litreading is part of Short Storyverses. shortstoryverses.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Aug 25, 202614 min
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 draws every boy in the neighborhood running to witness the spectacle.Booth Tarkington, one of only three writers to win two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, brings his gift for sharp character comedy to this brief, savage encounter between two animals who understand each other perfectly. The battle is brief, the casualties are mostly to dignity, and the ending involves a cistern, a miscalculation, and one of the most memorable splashes in American humor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
- Aug 18, 202633 min
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 Harding Davis, the most famous reporter of his generation, sets the Wisest Man in Wall Street down on a hard oak chair and leaves him there, unrecognized and unimportant, admitted only because he's "with Mr. Andrews," while the whole sorry parade of the city files past the bench.This is a comedy of manners with a soft heart. If you enjoy well-narrated short stories, check out our many story-telling podcasts at shortstoryverses.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Get HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories summaries in your inbox
Free AI-powered daily recaps. Key takeaways, quotes, and mentions — in a 5-minute read.
Get Free Summaries →Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
You Might Also Like
Listeners also like.
Silly Stories for Kids
A storyteller improvises silly, family-friendly adventures for children, encouraging imagination and laughter through spontaneous audio tales.
LOL Storytime - Stories for Kids
Silly, original stories for kids featuring pirate children, captured leprechauns, and other whimsical adventures.
ok storytime
A comedy podcast offering humorous advice on navigating important relationships.
Comedy Saved Me
Comedians and entertainers share personal stories about how humor helped them overcome life’s challenges and find healing through laughter.
Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends
Comedians help callers rewrite real-life texts for maximum humor, from speeches to dating profiles.
An Old Timey Podcast
Two siblings blend well-researched history with absurd humor, turning historical events into deeply silly yet insightful stories.
The Classic Tales Podcast
A weekly narration of classic literature from renowned authors, spanning global settings and timeless themes.
Story Time Society
Narrates bizarre and viral Reddit stories, including AITA drama and internet confessions, in daily episodes.
rSlash
Reads emotional and funny Reddit stories from subreddits like r/Prorevenge, r/EntitledParents, and r/ChoosingBeggars using character voices.
Timesuck with Dan Cummins
A comedian explores bizarre historical events, conspiracies, and true crime with dark humor and deep research.
Our American Stories
Ordinary Americans share personal stories of courage, resilience, faith, and generosity that highlight the best of the human spirit.
Let's Talk About Sets!
A playful podcast exploring the science and craft of stand-up comedy, created by comedians in New York City.
About HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories
Classic Tales and New Laughs from Twain to Today Comedy is the oldest trick in the book (or the short story), and HumorUs goes digging for the funniest classic tales with a few new ones sprinkled in. Each episode is one short story, narrated with care and a raised eyebrow. Bureaucratic guinea pigs that simply will not stop multiplying, courtesy of Ellis Parker Butler. A backwoods divorce that doubles right back into a wedding, by way of O. Henry. A shipwreck that strands exactly the wrong man, from the dry wit of W.W. Jacobs. A town so devoted to oversight it forms a committee to oversee the committees. Some of these tales are a hundred years old. Some are brand new. All of them prove the same stubborn little fact, that a good laugh never goes out of print. So pour something, settle in, and let the great humorists, famous and forgotten alike, humor us. All episodes are narrated by professional voice actor, Don McDonald.
Customized Recaps
AI-powered recaps with compact key takeaways, quotes, and insights.
Straight to Your Inbox
Get key takeaways from HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories in a 5-minute read.
Save Hours Every Week
Stay current on your favorite podcasts without falling behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Podzilla's HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories daily summary?
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
How does the HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories podcast summary work?
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by Don McDonald.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts. Upgrade to Pro for 15, or Premium for 50. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
How often does HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories release new episodes?
HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories publishes weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories cover?
HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories covers topics including Comedy, Fiction, Arts, Performing Arts. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting HumorUs Stories — Classic and Original Funny Stories summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.