The humor pieces of River and Sound
River and Sound Review is an independent literary journal, and this page indexes the 7 pieces of humor it has published since its first issue in 2023: 3 satires, 2 short comic stories and 2 essays that treat comedy as a literary craft. The humor of River and Sound Review sits inside the wider family of literary magazines, where the funny pieces are the rarest shelf. That family counts 4,000 active titles, and fewer than 5 percent of them run a standing humor slot each issue.
The reason is structural. Literary review magazines are built on a prestige economy: editors choose work that sounds serious, because serious sound is what keeps a journal quoted, reprinted and reissued. Comedy fails that test even when it is good, because a joke ages badly in quotation marks. A journal that wants to be compared to the long-running American quarterlies such as the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Granta and Ploughshares must therefore ration its laughs, and the ration is usually a single slot per issue, or a special edition once a year.
The funny pieces River and Sound Review has published
The funny pieces River and Sound Review has published fall into 3 types, and the table below is the full index. Every row names the type, the title, the issue and the page count, so a reader can find the piece without leaving this page. The journal assigns humor to these 3 types before it assigns it to an issue, which is why the index is stable even as the archive grows.
| Type | Title | Issue | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Satire | The Grant Committee | 1 | 4 |
| Satire | Peer Review, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying | 3 | 5 |
| Satire | The Departmental Retreat | 6 | 3 |
| Comic story | A Visit to the Bookshop That No Longer Exists | 2 | 6 |
| Comic story | The Last Subscription | 5 | 4 |
| Essay | In Defense of the Mild Anecdote | 4 | 3 |
| Essay | Why the Punchline Is the Least Funny Part | 7 | 4 |
The 3 satires all aim at the institutions that pay for and gatekeep the rest of the catalog: a grant committee, a peer review panel and a departmental retreat. The 2 comic stories work through character and situation rather than punchlines. The 2 essays argue, in a light register, for what comedy is actually doing in a sentence, and they are the 2 most reprinted items in the archive. Readers who came for the punchlines tend to stay for the essays.
Where literary magazine humor lives in the wider field
Literary magazine humor lives in 4 distinct places in the wider field, and knowing which one a journal occupies explains why its funny pieces read the way they do. The 4 places are the satirical quarterly, the humor literary magazine, the fiction-first journal and the poetry magazine, and each one runs comedy on a different schedule and with a different budget.
- Satirical quarterlies such as the New Yorker and Harper's run humor every month, in 1,200 to 1,500 word essays and 200 to 300 word gags, with a standing staff of writers on payroll.
- Humor literary magazines such as McSweeney's and the Onion's offshoot titles run comedy as the core product and treat the literary register as a costume, not a home.
- Fiction-first journals such as the Paris Review and Ploughshares accept a short comic story in roughly 1 out of every 4 issues, usually from a writer already known to the editor.
- Poetry magazines such as Poetry and The Paris Review poetry pages accept comic verse so rarely that the 1 poem that makes the cut gets remembered for a year, and humor in poetry is measured in single poems per volume rather than pages per issue.
River and Sound Review behaves like the 3rd category, fiction-first, but it gives the 3 types in its own index (satire, comic story, essay) more room than a typical fiction-first journal does. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the reason the journal's humor page is an index of 7 named pieces rather than a link out to 12 scattered issues.
How the journal accepts and edits comic work
River and Sound Review accepts comic work through the same open submissions portal as everything else, and the acceptance rate for humor is lower than the rate for the rest of the catalog: 2 percent versus 9 percent overall, across 1,900 pieces read in 2024. The editorial process is the same 3 pass sequence as for any other submission. The 1st pass checks fit and craft. The 2nd pass checks whether the piece still works when read aloud to another editor, because a joke that dies on the 2nd read has died for good. The 3rd pass is the placement decision, where the editor assigns the piece to one of the 3 types in the index above.
The journal is also hiring for its humor slot. The 1 open position, listed in the editorial jobs section of the site, is a contributing editor for satire and comic prose, with 4 pieces expected per year and a review of the submissions queue in month 3 and month 9. The 2 other open roles in the journal, a poetry editor and a nonfiction editor, do not touch the humor queue. Writers who want their comic piece read should submit to the humor line specifically, not the general fiction line, because the 2 lines go to different editors and the humor line is the only one that knows the 3 types.
Which literary magazines and journals run comedy
The magazines and journals that actually run comedy fall into a short, defensible list, and the table below is that list, with the schedule each one keeps. This is the answer to the questions searchers keep asking: which are the best literary magazines, which are the most prestigious literary magazines, which are the famous ones, and which of them are accepting submissions right now. The honest answer is that prestige and comedy do not travel together, so the list below is organized by schedule, not by ranking.
| Title | Type of humor | Humor schedule | Accepts submissions |
|---|---|---|---|
| The New Yorker | Essay, cartoon, short gag | Every issue | Open, with a 6 month turnaround |
| Harper's Magazine | Satire, polemic | Monthly | Open |
| McSweeney's | All humor, all register | Every issue | Open |
| The Paris Review | Occasional comic story | 1 in 4 issues | Open, fiction line |
| Ploughshares | Comic short story | Per issue, 2 pieces max | Open |
| Granta | Light nonfiction | Quarterly, 1 slot | Open, on a seasonal window |
| Poetry | Comic verse | 1 poem per volume | Open |
A writer looking for the literary magazines that accept submissions should check the window in the last column before sending, because a closed window is the 1 reason a good comic piece gets a form letter. The most prestigious literary magazines in this table, the New Yorker and Harper's, are also the 2 with the slowest turnaround, and the 1 with the lowest acceptance rate. Prestige is a function of age, readership and quotation, and none of those 3 rewards a writer quickly.
What the humor pieces in River and Sound Review are for
The humor pieces in River and Sound Review are for 3 jobs the serious catalog cannot do, and they do those jobs without asking the reader to forgive them. The 1st job is to keep the journal's own institutions honest, which is why all 3 satires point at grants, panels and retreats rather than at public figures. The 2nd job is to widen the reader's definition of what a literary magazine can be, so that a reader who came for a poem also gets a 4 page story about a bookshop that no longer exists. The 3rd job is to give the editors a place to argue about craft in a register that survives contact with the rest of the issue. The 2 essays in the index exist only for that 3rd job.
Comedy in a journal is a small, measurable thing: 7 pieces across 7 issues, 3 types, 1 open editor position, and a 2 percent acceptance rate that is doing its job. That is the full account of the humor in River and Sound Review, and the index above is where the pieces live.