Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker Read online

  FIERCE

  PAJAMAS

  AN ANTHOLOGY OF HUMOR WRITING

  FROM THE NEW YORKER

  EDITED BY DAVID REMNICK

  AND HENRY FINDER

  RANDOM HOUSE | NEW YORK

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  SPOOFS

  Death in the Rumble Seat / Wolcott Gibbs

  Dusk in Fierce Pajamas / E. B. White

  Across the Street and into the Grill / E. B. White

  On the Sidewalk / John Updike

  Save My Seat / Mike Nichols

  Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar / Woody Allen

  The Ultimate Diary / Howard Moss

  The Analytic Napkin / Marshall Brickman

  Who’s Who in the Cast / Marshall Brickman

  Health Department Lists Restaurant Violations / Daniel Menaker

  The Delts of Venus / Charles McGrath

  Notes from the Edge Conference / Roy Blount, Jr.

  LGA-ORD / Ian Frazier

  Love Trouble Is My Business / Veronica Geng

  In the New Canada, Living Is a Way of Life / Bruce McCall

  Corrections / Calvin Trillin

  Stardate 12:00 12:00 12:00 / Christopher Buckley

  Glengarry Glen Plaid / Frank Cammuso and Hart Seely

  Gum / Scott Gutterman

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Doughnuts / Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwarz

  Teen Times / Paul Rudnick

  THE FRENZY OF RENOWN

  Press Agents I Have Known / Groucho Marx

  The Greatest Man in the World / James Thurber

  The Interview / James Thurber

  Let’s Hear It for a Beautiful Guy / Bruce Jay Friedman

  The King of Jazz / Donald Barthelme

  My Mao / Veronica Geng

  Our Side of the Story / Veronica Geng

  Do You Know Me? / George W. S. Trow

  Gandhi at the Bat / Chet Williamson

  Igor Stravinsky: The Selected Phone Calls / Ian Frazier

  We Are Still Married / Garrison Keillor

  Meeting Famous People / Garrison Keillor

  Yo, Poe / Frank Gannon

  My Life: A Series of Privately Funded Performance-Art Pieces / Susan Orlean

  The A-List E-List / David Brooks

  THE WAR BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN

  Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife / James Thurber

  A Couple of Hamburgers / James Thurber

  Forever Panting / Peter De Vries

  The Kugelmass Episode / Woody Allen

  Partners / Veronica Geng

  My Married Life: The Whole Truth Thus Far / Mark Singer

  Life Without Leann / Larry Doyle

  Zeus the Lutheran / Garrison Keillor

  The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe / Susan Sontag

  Off-Ramp / Polly Frost

  Blown Away / Lisa Walker

  Here’s a Really Great Idea / David Owen

  THE WRITING LIFE

  A Short Autobiography / F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The Cliché Expert Takes the Stand / Frank Sullivan

  The Cliché Expert Tells All / Frank Sullivan

  How to Achieve Success as a Writer / Ruth Suckow

  The Rather Difficult Case of Mr. K A P L A N / Leonard Q. Ross

  The Notebooks of James Thurber / James Thurber

  Are We Losing the Novel Race? / Michael J. Arlen

  Roland Magruder, Freelance Writer / Calvin Trillin

  Contemporary Writers VI: An Interview with Grip Sands / Philip Hamburger

  In the Dough / Roger Angell

  Selections from the Allen Notebooks / Woody Allen

  I Cover Carter / George W. S. Trow

  Notes on My Conversations / Polly Frost

  Writing Is Easy! / Steve Martin

  Drivel / Steve Martin

  Emily Dickinson, Jerk of Amherst / Andy Borowitz

  A FUNNY THING HAPPENED

  The People Who Had the House Before / Robert Benchley

  The Catastrophe / William Shawn

  The Secret Life of Walter Mitty / James Thurber

  I Am Not Now, Nor Have I Ever Been, a Matrix of Lean Meat / S. J. Perelman

  Eine Kleine Mothmusik / S. J. Perelman

  Monomania, You and Me Is Quits / S. J. Perelman

  Pnin / Vladimir Nabokov

  Annoy Kaufman, Inc. / George S. Kaufman

  The Last Repository / H. F. Ellis

  YMA Dream / Thomas Meehan

  Ainmosni / Roger Angell

  The High Ground, or Look, Ma, I’m Explicating / Peter De Vries

  Apartment 6-A: After the Fall / Ian Frazier

  Spill / George W. S. Trow

  Hearing from Wayne / Bill Franzen

  Stunned / Jack Handey

  He Didn’t Go to Canada / Garrison Keillor

  Post-Euphoria / Veronica Geng

  Keith Richards’ Desert-Island Disks / Noah Baumbach

  WORDS OF ADVICE

  How to Be Obscene / Upton Sinclair

  Filling That Hiatus / Robert Benchley

  It’s Fun to Be Fooled . . . It’s More Fun to Know / Robert Benchley

  Why We Laugh—or Do We? / Robert Benchley

  Insert Flap “A” and Throw Away / S. J. Perelman

  How to Eat an Ice-Cream Cone / L. Rust Hills

  Teaching Poetry Writing to Singles / Veronica Geng

  Dating Your Mom / Ian Frazier

  A Reading List for Young Writers / Ian Frazier

  How I Write My Songs / Donald Barthelme

  Save Our Bus Herds! / Cathleen Schine

  Three Great Meals / William White

  Read This First / Bruce McCall

  Take It from Me / Nancy Franklin

  Changes in the Memory After Fifty / Steve Martin

  The Hundred Greatest Books That I’ve Read / Steve Martin

  Reintroducing Me to My Habitat / Jack Handey

  Thank You for Stopping / Jack Handey

  Homework: A Parent’s Guide / Christopher Buckley

  What Happened to My Money? / David Owen

  RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS

  On Taxi Drivers / Alexander Woollcott

  Father Isn’t Much Help / Clarence Day

  The Night the Ghost Got In / James Thurber

  Ring Out, Wild Bells / Wolcott Gibbs

  The Ballet Visits the Splendide’s Magician / Ludwig Bemelmans

  Cloudland Revisited: Why, Doctor, What Big Green Eyes You Have! / S. J. Perelman

  Thoughts on Radio-Televese / John Lardner

  The Musical Husbands / Adam Gopnik

  Listening to Bourbon / Louis Menand

  Look Back in Hunger / Anthony Lane

  Tennis Personalities / Martin Amis

  Car Talk / John Updike

  VERSE

  Critic / E. B. White

  Song to Be Disregarded / E. B. White

  To a Perfumed Lady at the Concert / E. B. White

  Song of the Queen Bee / E. B. White

  Rhyme of an Involuntary Violet / Dorothy Parker

  Fulfilment / Dorothy Parker

  Bohemia / Dorothy Parker

  Mother’s Home Again! / Don Marquis

  Melancholy Reflections After a Lost Argument / Phyllis McGinley

  The Seven Ages of a Newspaper Subscriber / Phyllis McGinley

  Incident in the Afternoon / Phyllis McGinley

  Procrastination Is All of the Time / Ogden Nash

  To My Valentine /
Ogden Nash

  So That’s Who I Remind Me Of / Ogden Nash

  Compliments of a Friend / Ogden Nash

  The Invitation Says from Five to Seven / Ogden Nash

  Theme and Variation / Peter De Vries

  People / W. H. Auden

  Six Poets in Search of a Lawyer / Donald Hall

  The Naked and the Nude / Robert Graves

  12 O’Clock News / Elizabeth Bishop

  Christmas in Qatar / Calvin Trillin

  Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums / John Updike

  Ocular Hypertension / John Updike

  Endnotes

  Notes on Contributors

  About the Editors

  Copyright

  To John Updike

  INTRODUCTION

  FOR all that has been written about the origins of The New Yorker, the significance of one fact has been overlooked: its main backer owed his fortune to yeast. To be founded upon yeast is different from being founded upon soap, or steel, or natural gas, and, surely, the source of this seed money—spore money?—set the tone for all that followed. Our first editor, Harold Ross, wanted a publication that would be consistently leavened by comedy. It was his constant refrain: “We need words like the art”—prose that matched the spirit of the cartoons. “Humor was allowed to infect everything,” E. B. White, a singularly contagious soul, would write. And Ross’s efforts paid off: New Yorker humor, like Dole pineapples and Microsoft operating systems, represents a deep alliance of product and institution.

  It was a serious business, putting out what Ross called his “comic weekly.” Lois Long, an early contributor, described daily staff meetings that consisted of craps games, and an editor whose wont was “to move the desks about prankishly in the dead of night.” (Some things never change.) To start naming the magazine’s contributors in its earliest years is to explain how Ross achieved his objectives. There was Dorothy Parker, who, as Constant Reader, concluded a review of Dreiser’s memoir Dawn with the couplet “Theodore Dreiser / Should ought to write nicer.” There was Robert Benchley, for a decade the magazine’s chief drama critic, who ascribed to John Barrymore’s Hamlet “the smile of an actor who hates actors, and who knows that he is going to kill two or three before the play is over.” There was Lois Long herself on fashion; Ring Lardner on radio; George Ryall (Audax Minor) on the racetrack; and Alexander Woollcott on whatever popped into his head. If humor infected everything, it was because it wasn’t quarantined to humor pieces, or “casuals,” as they came to be known. An undercurrent of jokiness ran through the reviews and the commentary. (That tradition has lasted—from the unfailing urbanity of Brendan Gill and the unfailing anti-urbanity of Pauline Kael down to the spring-loaded wit of such writers as Nancy Franklin and Anthony Lane, who have kept the art of the comic review very much alive.) After the arrival, in the thirties, of Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, Ross got long-form journalism with matching brio and brilliance. The comic weekly had come of age.

  Still, if there was such a thing as New Yorker humor—as distinct from humor in The New Yorker—the credit must go largely to E. B. White and James Thurber. White, a master of understatement, could creep along so quietly you might not realize that he was stalking prey, and that you were it. Thurber was perhaps a more belligerent soul, but then his favorite quarry was himself. Both worked in every comic form and invented new ones; and their touch was so pervasive that, in the words of Brendan Gill, “the persona of the magazine [was] White-Thurber.” Yet White and Thurber had a particular genius for creating personas of their own. In 1927, Thurber published “An American Romance,” which opens, “The little man in an overcoat that fitted him badly at the shoulders had had a distressing scene with his wife. He had left home with a look of serious determination and had now been going around and around in the central revolving door of a prominent department store’s main entrance for fifteen minutes.” With this, “Little Man” humor, as it came to be called, was launched—tales of ineffectual men victimized by the world, by women, by nagging suspicions of their own absurdity.

  Another comic specialty of the magazine was what Benchley dubbed “dementia praecox” humor: monologues, basically, of the unstrung and the unhinged—“The Tell-Tale Heart” with laughs. It was a mainstay of Benchley’s repertory, and so was the news-clipping conceit: the piece that started with some scrap of news and elaborated on the premise ad absurdum. In the thirties, the humorous reminiscence, too, became a staple of The New Yorker. It began, more or less, with a notable series of pieces by Clarence Day, a former stockbroker who, confined to his apartment by severe arthritis, set about writing affectionately satiric anecdotes about life with his father. Shortly after Day’s first piece appeared, in 1933, Thurber started publishing bits of autobiography about his Ohio upbringing, eventually collected under the title My Life and Hard Times. Thus primed, the pump soon yielded memoirs by Ludwig Bemelmans, H. L. Mencken, and Ruth McKenney. As an old bit of magazine wisdom has it, you get what you publish.

  Sometimes—blessedly—you get even what you don’t publish. To editors, as custodians of standards, work that broke the rules could seem just broken. A recent chronicler of the magazine, Ben Yagoda, has extracted from the archives an exchange of memos among three of its most illustrious editors—Katharine S. White, Wolcott Gibbs, and John Mosher—in reaction to a 1933 submission called “The Island of Dr. Finkle,” apparently inspired by the recently released film version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here’s a sample.

  WHITE: “Not having seen the Island of Dr. What’s His Name I don’t know whether this is any good. He seems to be burlesquing a dozen things at once also??”

  GIBBS: “I didn’t know there was any such book. Thought this was just a burlesque of those old clubmen talking about India stories. . . . Object to one or two of the worst gags, but other wise O.K. By the way, Donald Stewart and Thurber have both done things like this, if it matters.”

  MOSHER: “Awful humor—this dry, synthetic stale style—central idea about island is rather funny perhaps. . . . I can’t stand these trick phrasings—jumpy nervous nasty things.”

  In a letter of rejection to the author, Ross offered the following counsel: “I think you ought to decide when you write a piece whether it is going to be a parody, or a satire, or nonsense. These are not very successfully mixed in short stuff; that has been my experience.” Though the advice went unheeded, a few years later Ross hired Sidney Joseph Perelman anyway. In an introduction to a 1937 Perelman collection, Robert Benchley himself graciously declared that the Brooklyn-born interloper now owned the “dementia praecox field”: “Any further attempts to garble thought-processes sounded like imitation-Perelman.” Perhaps determined to keep such imitators at bay, Perelman went on to flood the market with the real thing, contributing three hundred casuals over the next four decades. In 1952—when about a hundred and thirty of them had so far seen print—W. H. Auden pronounced The New Yorker “the best comic magazine in existence.”

  Persistence was one way past the praetorian guards, but there were other routes, too. Prospective contributors may wish to study the example of Peter De Vries. De Vries, who grew up in Chicago, came to The New Yorker’s attention from Poetry magazine via James Thurber; and he came to Thurber’s attention via a flattering essay he had published entitled “James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock.” It is just possible to imagine that his career trajectory would have been different had he published, instead, “Ed Sullivan: The Comic Prufrock.”

  Students of the magazine have pointed out that the fifties saw the addition of relatively few new comic voices. There are various theories to account for this. Some conjecture that if only people like Stanley Elkin, Terry Southern, or Joseph Heller had published something along the lines of “James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock,” they, too, might have found their way into the magazine. Others blame the growing allure of Hollywood—the maw of Tinseltown. Yet, as was the case with Benchley, Perelman, and Parker, the traffic between the coasts goes both ways. Sensitive artists,
moreover, have always found this world of glitz and glamour something of a hardship post, what with being ordered around by besuited philistines and having their words hacked at by an army of anonymous interlopers. Which is not to say that Hollywood is any better.

  In the event, the lean years were followed by fat: in the sixties, new arrivals included Calvin Trillin, Pauline Kael, Donald Barthelme, and Woody Allen. They published journalism, criticism, fiction, and casuals, and they were funny, in ways slightly different from the way people used to be funny. In the seventies and eighties, some of the magazine’s most distinctive voices—including Garrison Keillor, Veronica Geng, George W. S. Trow, and Ian Frazier—devoted themselves to reinventing the casual. (To read Frazier’s “A Reading List for Young Writers” is to inoculate oneself against writing sonorously about literature.) And in the past decade a new generation of contributors—but why mention names you’ll find in the issues on your coffee table?—both extend and pay homage to a tradition arduously achieved, and do it in ways that can be stunningly original, or stunningly not. As the poet said, there’s tradition, and there’s the individual talent, and a collection like this one helps you appreciate how intertwined the two are—how eerily contemporary some of the old stuff seems, how venerable some of the new.

  WHY did we choose what we chose? On the whole, the basis for our selections was visceral: Was a piece funny? Is it still? Did it make us gasp with admiration and an apprehension of the sublime? (This last was optional.) Yes, you’ll find the odd concession—sometimes very odd—to literary history. But basically pieces are here because they made us laugh. A very few are here because they’re weird, ethereal, and beautiful, and would have made us laugh if we were better people. Sophisticates may object that we have included pieces they consider overexposed, excessively familiar. Behind this objection, we submit, is a fetching misunderstanding of contemporary American culture. “Overexposed” may describe a Pepsi commercial with Britney Spears; it does not describe “The Night the Ghost Got In.”

  What taxed our ingenuity wasn’t so much deciding what to put in as deciding what not to. “Humor was allowed to infect everything,” as White had observed, and, for an anthologist, that’s just the problem. A collection of humor writing from The New Yorker can’t be a collection of humorous writing from The New Yorker—a category that would include perhaps the greater part of the magazine’s output. To keep the book to a compassable length, we resorted to firm, if arbitrary rules. In the end, the essential principle of inclusion, for any given candidate, was simple: did we fail to come up with some excuse for excluding it?