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Alumni Spotlight: Howie Kremer Lands Double Feature in Slackjaw and Weekly Humorist
by Writing Workshops Staff
5 days ago
“My knee vibrated like a jackhammer and rattled the brochure stand for ‘Sullivan Bank Crypto Savings.’”
So opens Hot Chicken Gelato, Howie Kremer’s new piece in Weekly Humorist—a tender, deranged little love story disguised as a botched bank robbery, complete with a Walmart pistol, an angelic stranger in a Trader Joe’s tote, and four hypothetical children named Robber, Robbie, Robert, and Felony.
It’s the second time this spring Howie has landed a piece in a top humor outlet.
In March, Slackjaw published his Ex-Bullpen Catcher Stan Harvey’s Very Legit Advice For Throwing Out A Ceremonial First Pitch—a perfect upsell-spiral of an essay that begins with tennis elbow and ends with a Bozeman, Montana subdivision packed with eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-old influencers.
By any measure, this is a heater of an opening run.
From Apatow’s Writers’ Rooms to the Humor Page
If you’ve watched TV in the past decade, you’ve probably already laughed at Howie’s work. A comedy writer and director whose credits include Let’s Get Physical, Fighting with My Family, and Trophy Wife, he spent the last five years writing and producing for Judd Apatow. He’s also a lifelong Cardinals fan who plays in a Sunday league and lives with four cats—Musie, Bunnypenny, Freckles, and Winnie—facts that explain a lot about his recent output.
So why would a working TV writer with that kind of résumé sign up for a two-hour humor seminar? Because, as Howie put it in his own bracingly honest before-and-after: “Before taking the workshop, my writing life was unstructured and bad, but now it’s not.”
The Class That Cracked Things Open
In February 2026, Howie joined Caitlin Kunkel’s How to Write a Short Humor Piece—a generative seminar where Caitlin walks writers through a repeatable process for brainstorming, structuring, and fast-drafting a piece in the spirit of McSweeney’s, The Belladonna, and Points in Case. For Howie, two specific tools did the heavy lifting:
“The beginning process—the cluster Kaitlin taught us, but especially the revision rubric. That really unlocked things for me.”
You can see that unlocking in both new pieces. The Slackjaw essay is a masterclass in escalating premise: Stan Harvey’s “system” for throwing a ceremonial first pitch starts innocently with pickleball, branches into kickball leagues, and snowballs into cold plunges, a personal trainer named Kelsey, and a trademarked program with the absurd acronym S.H.I.G.V.T.S.F.P.T.C.F.P.™. It’s the kind of piece that only lands if the architecture is sound underneath the chaos—exactly what a joke-cluster plus a real revision pass is built to deliver.
Hot Chicken Gelato applies the same craft to a longer narrative shape. It moves with the rhythm of a meet-cute, but every beat is sabotaged: AirPods feeding pep talks during an attempted heist, a best friend giving mid-robbery updates on Aunt Dawn’s watercolor washes, Wendy’s-menu codewords signaling everything from “things are going well” to “let’s talk when we get home.” The premise is unhinged. The structure is rock-solid.
Joy as a Method
When we asked Howie what gets him through the hard days at the keyboard, his answer doubled as a writing philosophy: “Finding my joy—what makes me laugh—and following it.”
Right now that joy is aimed squarely at his kitties. The piece keeping him up at night, in the best way, is written from the POV of his cat—a thorough catalogue of all the ways Howie is a disappointment as a cat dad, and how she is, in essence, only using him for sustenance and warmth. We cannot wait to read it.
His Advice for the Fence-Sitters
Asked what he’d say to someone hovering over the “register” button, Howie’s answer was, fittingly, the funniest in his survey:
“Get off the fence. Put on your favorite hat and go get some cake. Then, after you sign up for this class—eat the cake as a treat for doing something incredible for yourself.”
We’re honored to have been a brief stop on Howie’s run. With a TV pilot in pre-production, a cat-POV essay in progress, and two humor pieces out in the world this spring, what comes next looks a lot like more of the good stuff. You can keep up with him at howiekremer.com or follow him on Instagram and Threads at @howieekremer.
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