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Alumni Spotlight: Tod Brubaker’s Fake Obituary Lands in Reader’s Digest
by Writing Workshops Staff
2 hours ago
“I cracked a joke at age 8 and made my mother’s friend laugh. I was hooked.”
Tod Brubaker has been chasing that laugh ever since. He spent his career in advertising and wrote humor on the side for McSweeney’s, Slackjaw, Little Old Lady Comedy, and New York Newsday. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now describes himself as a retired ad guy who can sit around all day writing silly stories.
In January 2024, Points in Case ran “This Obituary Does Not Give a Cause of Death, but Wouldn’t You Love to Know.” The site named it one of its best pieces of 2024, and Reader’s Digest is reprinting it in its October/November 2026 issue.
That piece came before Tod took a class with us, but he found WritingWorkshops.com by word of mouth in the summer of 2025 and started with Caitlin Kunkel’s Mine Your Life for Funny Ideas, then took two seminars with Elissa Bassist: How to Write a Comedic Memoir and Writing Funnier Nonfiction. The lesson that stuck, he says, was “The validation that you can write humorously about very serious things.”
You can see that at work in “My Dad Toiled Away as a Lawyer So I Could Have a Better Life as a Plumber,” which Points in Case published this past July. Tod is now trying to write the true story behind it as an essay or a Moth piece, and Elissa’s class nudged him toward a memoir, working title Fucking Upwardly: How I Surprised Everyone and Turned Out Okay.
His method for getting unstuck: “I just put my fingers on the keyboard and type. It might be completely nonsensical at first, but it eventually starts to make sense.” His advice for anyone on the fence about a workshop: “Just do it. Wait, is that line taken?”
Find more of his work at todbrubaker.squarespace.com.
If you have a serious story and a suspicion it might be funny, Elissa Bassist and Caitlin Kunkel teach humor seminars on Zoom all year, alongside fiction, nonfiction, and poetry workshops. Most meet once and come with a recording if you can’t make it live.
