Copyright © 2008 by The New Yorker Magazine
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All of the pieces in this collection were originally published in The New Yorker. The publication date of each piece is given at the end of the piece.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-803-4
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
COUPLES
The Breaking Up of the Winships / James Thurber
The House of Mirth / Peter De Vries
The Zagat History of My Last Relationship / Noah Baumbach
8 Simple Rules for Dating My Ex-Wife / David Owen
Audio Tour / Patricia Marx
Share Our Joy / Larry Doyle
THE FLESH IS WEAK
Frigidity in Men / E. B. White
The New Yorker Advisor / Roger Angell
The Whore of Mensa / Woody Allen
Artichoke / Polly Frost
My Sexual Fantasies / Jim Windolf
Aristotle on Relationships / Frank Gannon
Four Short Crushes / Paul Simms
CHILDREN’S HOURS
Stage Father / Calvin Trillin
Shiftless Little Loafers / Susan Orlean
Recently Discovered Childhood Letters to Santa / Johnny Carson
How to Lay Off Your Kids / Carina Chocano
Camp Correspondence / Bruce McCall
College Essay / Christopher Buckley
Inappropriate / Paul Rudnick
The Wisdom of Children / Simon Rich
Hey, Look / Simon Rich
ANIMAL CRACKERS
Coyote v. Acme / Ian Frazier
What to Do About Sharks / Bruce McCall
All I Really Need to Know I Learned by Having My Arms Ripped Off by a Polar Bear / Andrew Barlow
Animals All Around Us / Jack Handey
The Living Dead / David Sedaris
Talking Chimp Gives His First Press Conference / Paul Simms
My Dog Is Tom Cruise / Noah Baumbach
Aesop in the City / Yoni Brenner
Monkey Do / Yoni Brenner
Animal Tales / Simon Rich
NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS
Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer / S. J. Perelman
Early Morning of a Motion Picture Executive / Thomas Meehan
Hollywood in the Fifties / Garrison Keillor
Running Through the Wall / Frank Gannon
The Envelope, Please: A Viewer’s Guide to the Emmys / Jon Stewart
Theatre-Lobby Notices / Andy Borowitz
Review / Patricia Marx
Studio Script Notes on The Passion / Steve Martin
Why We Strike / Larry Doyle
ARTISTS AND AUTHORS
Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles / Wolcott Gibbs
Life Cycle of a Literary Genius / E. B. White
Complete Guide for Book Reviewers / Ruth Suckow
How to Tell a Major Poet from a Minor Poet / E. B. White
The Metterling Lists / Woody Allen
Without Whose Unfailing Encouragement / H. F. Ellis
Jack Schmidt, Arts Administrator / Garrison Keillor
England Picks a Poet / Ian Frazier
Settling an Old Score / Veronica Geng
Unspoken O’Neill / Henry Alford
Van Gogh in AOL / Noah Baumbach
Picasso Promoting Lady with a Fan / Steve Martin
Suitable for Framing / David Sedaris
Ideas for Paintings / Jack Handey
The Knowledge / Henry Alford
SONG OF MYSELF
The Little Hours / Dorothy Parker
The Early Essays / Woody Allen
I Embrace the New Candor / George W. S. Trow
Carbohydrates / Polly Frost
Shiksa Goddess / Wendy Wasserstein
Lowering My Standards / Jack Handey
Suffering Fools Gladly / Andy Borowitz
An Announcement / Mark Singer
Pledge Drive / Patricia Marx
Thin Enough / Ian Frazier
Awake / Jenny Allen
REAL IMITATIONS
A Visit from Saint Nicholas / James Thurber
Intruder in the Dusk / Peter De Vries
No Kaddish for Weinstein / Woody Allen
Rolled in Rare Bohemian Onyx, Then Vulcanized by Hand / Bruce McCall
Oldfinger / Frank Cammuso and Hart Seely
The Last Catalogue / John Kenney
The Ethicist / Steve Martin
Under the Provençal Deadline / Bruce McCall
Jewelers’ Caesar / Anthony Lane
Class Notes / Ian Frazier
Air Pockets / Bruce McCall
The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment / Jonathan Stern
Ask the Optimist! / George Saunders
TESTAMENTS AND DECLARATIONS
The Diary of a Lady / Dorothy Parker
The Secret Life of James Thurber / James Thurber
End of the Trail / Garrison Keillor
My and Ed’s Peace Proposals / Veronica Geng
You Missed It / George W. S. Trow
A Man Who Can’t Love / George W. S. Trow
How I’m Doing / David Owen
A Prayer / Paul Simms
My Living Will / Paul Rudnick
What I’d Say to the Martians / Jack Handey
This Is No Game / Jack Handey
Proclamation / George Saunders
THE GREAT AND THE GOOD
What, Another Legend? / Marshall Brickman
The New York Review of Gossip / Marshall Brickman
The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo / Ian Frazier
Kimberley Solzhenitsyn’s Calendar / Ian Frazier
Record Roundup / Veronica Geng
Babe Ruth: My Teammate, My Lover / Roger Angell
Donald Rumsfeld Orders Breakfast at Denny’s / Frank Gannon
What Would Jesus Test-Drive? / Jesse Lichtenstein
Intelligent Design / Paul Rudnick
Jeeves and W. / Christopher Buckley
EXPLANATIONS AND ADVISORIES
So You’re Going to New York / Robert Benchley
A Hard Day at the Office / Peter De Vries
A Look at Organized Crime / Woody Allen
The People’s Shopper / Garrison Keillor
Seek Dwellings for MX / Cathleen Schine
Side Effects / Steve Martin
Superstring Theory for Dummies / Zev Borow
Researchers Say / Ian Frazier
Brainteasers: The Aftermath / Don Steinberg
A Survey of the Literature / George Saunders
Your Table Is Ready / John Kenney
Pre-Approved for Platinum / Frank Gannon
May We Tell You Our Specials This Evening? / Larry Doyle
Getting Started / Bruce McCall
I’m Afraid I Have Some Bad News / Larry Doyle
How to Operate the Shower Curtain / Ian Frazier
PAST IMPERFECT
No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plaît / S. J. Perelman
More, and Still More, Memories of the Nineteen-Twenties / Michael J. Arlen
The Pickwick Capers / Bruce McCall
The Gospel of Debbie / Paul Rudnick
1992 House / Billy Frolick
Further Proof That Lincoln Was Gay / Paul Rudnick
FIELD NOTES FROM ALL OVER
Show Dog / Susan Orlean
The Tired Chronicles / Betsy Berne
Paranoid Packaging / John Updike
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Conscientious Consumption / David Brooks
The End Matter / Louis Menand
The Underminer / Mike Albo and Virginia Heffernan
Model Citizens / Nancy Franklin
Space Case / Anthony Lane
PERSONAL HISTORY
The Night the Bed Fell / James Thurber
The Huntress / Wolcott Gibbs
One / Peter De Vries
Disquiet, Please, We’re Turning! / S. J. Perelman
Confessions of a Standup Sausage Eater / Calvin Trillin
A Purim Story / Adam Gopnik
In the Waiting Room / David Sedaris
Tasteless / David Sedaris
Notes on Contributors
INTRODUCTION
BEFORE the folks at The New Yorker could reliably make anybody else laugh, they specialized in entertaining themselves. The magazine was launched in February of 1925, and its early issues were, to be charitable, hit or miss. Harold Ross, the founding editor, figured that the only thing in the debut issue that really worked was Rea Irvin’s cover portrait of Eustace Tilly, peering through his monocle at a butterfly.
But the workplace, by all accounts, was a riot. The irascible James Thurber caused a copy editor to faint when he burst in on him with a pistol in hand, yelling, “Are you the son of a bitch that keeps putting notes in red ink on the proofs of my Talk stories?” When Ross found Dorothy Parker at a speakeasy instead of at her desk, she had a ready—and, yes, often quoted—excuse: “Someone was using the pencil.” Then there was the drunk-dialing incident, when Ross had had too much Scotch and telephoned the great cartoonist Peter Arno in the middle of the night to tell him he was fired. (So much funnier the next day.) Rea Irvin, the magazine’s art editor, drew a not-for-public-consumption takeoff of the Eustace Tilly cover for the boss’s birthday: It featured a silhouette of Ross—an upward shock of hair, a limp cigarette dangling from his mouth—peering at a globular insect with a distinct resemblance to the drama critic Alexander Woollcott. A mannequin from Wanamaker’s (E. B. White had used pictures of it in a series of ads he composed for a 1927 circulation campaign) stood in Ross’s office, complete with a filthy hairpiece, for years after the joke was forgotten, which, for Ross, was exactly what made it funny.
The freshest stuff that appeared in the magazine back then was often self-parody, possibly more amusing to the staff than to anyone else. Much was made of the “vast organization” of The New Yorker; a picture of Grand Central Station was described in a caption as the magazine’s “sumptuous waiting room.” The truth is, the staff’s most inspired work in those days never made it beyond the vast organization; the in-house editorial memos (we reprint one of them, by the editor and writer Wolcott Gibbs) regularly outstripped anything that actually appeared in print. And then—the magazine found its voice, or voices.
A handful of people competing to make one another laugh: It’s not the worst way for an original comic enterprise to begin. Maybe it’s the only way. If something you did got a laugh from your friends, you wouldn’t be discouraged by the fact that most people didn’t get it; if you were on to something, plenty of those people would come around. More than anything, Ross wanted his magazine to be funny, but he didn’t want it to be funny the way other magazines were funny. The debut issue of The New Yorker printed a lame Q&A-style joke, which ended with the Q. Many assumed it was a typographical error; more likely, it was an absurdist, defiant assertion that the magazine wasn’t in the business of serving up conventional humor. In the magazine Ross wanted to create, there would be no setup/punch-line jokes—no knock-knocks, no “kids say the darnedest things” squibs, no afterdinner anecdotes, nothing about a priest and a rabbi walking into a bar.
It was one thing to avow what New Yorker humor wasn’t; it took a little longer to establish what it was. That’s where Thurber and White came in. In the Thumbelina realm of New Yorker history, Thurber and White were the framers of a comic constitution, our Adams and Jefferson, albeit without the cupping scars and slave children. They ranged widely in the forms they explored, and encouraged others to do so. Some of what the magazine published, as it hit its stride, was parody—of radio monologues, of what Ross called “journalese,” of advertising copy, of etiquette manuals, of the mannerisms of the great novelists. There were depictions of the sad-sack sufferer, an updated version of the silent-movie schlemiel. There were stories of comic happenings, real or imagined. There were waggish commentaries that did figure eights on the line of irony. There were the rants, presented straight, of the wildly unhinged or the obliviously self-satisfied.
Needless to say, every good writer at the magazine had his or her own voice, and his or her own devils. Dorothy Parker’s depictions of drunken or hungover heroines were no doubt influenced by her own boozy ways; and you can glimpse Thurber’s blighted first marriage—it’s like opening a freezer—in tales of connubial misery like “Quiet, Please,” “Not Together,” and (included in this anthology) “The Breaking Up of the Winships.” Yet something distinctive arose from the juxtaposition of all these voices. The marriage, like the hangovers, came to an end; the work has pretty much survived. Within a few years of the magazine’s launch, a contributor complained to a rejecting editor that a humor piece written for The New Yorker couldn’t be placed elsewhere: The magazine’s preferences were too idiosyncratic, too distant from what everyone else was up to. “We have evolved a system for the smooth operation of a literary bordello,” White later wrote. “The system is this: We write as we please, and the magazine publishes as it pleases. When the two pleasures coincide, something gets into print.”
There are no guns, toy or otherwise, at the magazine’s offices these days. The whole firing-while-drunk thing happens only rarely. That mannequin has long since disappeared (though we have our suspicions). Staff members have learned the hard way not to make fun of the boss’s coiffure, ever. But the bordello system that White described remains intact. It has functioned so well, in fact, that the magazine’s archives are full to bursting with humor, a goodly amount of it still humorous. Putting together an anthology of New Yorker humor writing is so much fun we’ve done it twice.
THE publication of our previous sampler, Fierce Pajamas, gave us pleasure; but also pain. For every piece we included, we left out two that we liked just as much. Between the anthology’s editors, second-guessing soon began in earnest. What could explain a blunder like (to name one of many) leaving out “Kimberley Solzhenitsyn’s Calendar”? Exactly which one of us was asleep at the wheel? Years of recrimination ensued. Styptic glances gave way to glowering stares and then long, wintry silences. If Disquiet, Please! is a follow-up, every follow-up is also, in certain respects, a do-over. In making our selections, we have therefore adhered to an especially rigorous methodology. First, we gathered pieces, not found in the previous anthology, that made us laugh, or beam, or both. Then, when those proved too numerous to fit into a book, we arranged the pieces in a circle and spun a bottle. Afterward, we recycled the bottle.
For all that, we could not escape the guilty knowledge that many of the funniest pieces that The New Yorker publishes aren’t exactly humor pieces. They are, rather, works of reporting, opinion, or criticism in which the comic eye and sensibility are fully engaged, and, as before, we couldn’t do them justice. Humor has never been segregated in the magazine that Ross founded. And yet the anthologist looks for density, for concentration—for an array of comic effects on display in a relatively small space. The difference between a humor piece and a humorous piece is the difference between attar of rose and actual roses. This is not to the discredit of roses, whose breeding and cultivation we hold in high esteem. It’s just that humorists are generally less encumbered than reporters or reviewers by the task of explaining how a bill was passed or a bridge was built, or what an actual person or movie is actually like. The journalist’s challenge is to paint an urn that must hold water. The humorist can turn a lump of clay into an urn that pointedly fails to.
In compiling this book,
we also took full advantage of the fact that, since the last time around, we had almost a decade’s worth of new pieces to choose from, and we helped ourselves to those recent harvests with two hands, or maybe four. It’s what the founders would have done. Whether it was genius or dumb luck, Ross, White, Thurber, Gibbs, and the rest managed to do something that eluded even the incomparably gifted H. L. Mencken and George S. Nathan, who jointly piloted the long-defunct (and slightly New Yorker-ish) magazine Smart Set. They managed to create a magazine with an identity potent enough, yet capacious enough, to outlast them—a magazine that could be renewed and remade and remain recognizably itself. We thereby honor the Founders, in this collection, by giving them short shrift. (You’ll find them more decently represented in Fierce Pajamas, which also boasts a section of comic verse sufficient to forgo supplementation here.) We’ve instead devoted the balance of our space to their successors, their legatees. Most of the more recent comic talents we’ve included are still living, or very nearly; some are even young. In Disquiet, Please! we’ve taken the opportunity to present late-vintage wine from old vines (not old; established, really, or, let’s say, distinguished). But we’ve also had the particular pleasure of introducing previously unpublished contributors, such as Yoni Brenner or Simon Rich, who, we understand, was not yet born when Fierce Pajamas came out, and is not old enough to drink that wine. We have erred on the side of newness.
AND yet the new is never so new as all that. Men and women still drive each other nuts, just as in olden days. Self-delusion still generates insight. The entertainment industry is still seductive and silly. Our children still bring out the best in us, and the worst. Puffed-up literary piety still invites piercing. In convention-bound prose—ad copy, class notes, Zagat reviews, drug disclaimers, popularizations of impenetrable science, tonight’s specials, the gossip column—cliché is always just a few clicks away from preposterousness. Furry animals: You can never go wrong with them. And it’s still the case that (as White learned long ago) you should never get into an argument with a libertarian. At the cutting edge of comedy, you’ll find few moves that Thurber and White wouldn’t have recognized, and few they didn’t attempt.
Surveying the contributors to this anthology, across four generations, we’ve noticed other continuities, other patterns. We can now start to puzzle through a question we’re often asked: What makes a New Yorker humor writer? Is there a particular course of study, some people have even wondered, that can actually produce a New Yorker humorist? (The answer is yes, but Hunter College no longer offers it.) What sort of career experiences are helpful? Having researched this matter, we can offer a few pointers. Peter De Vries, as a young man, once played a wounded gorilla on a radio drama, and we can think of no better preparation for The New Yorker’s editorial process. Granted, there are other contenders. The world of advertising seems to be a pretty good incubator for wisenheimers. White himself served time writing ad copy (one of his first New Yorker pieces imagined what would happen if spring, the season, were an advertising account), and it’s a résumé he shares with such current contributors as Bruce McCall and John Kenney, who likewise know from the inside the codes and cadences they send up. Other humor writers have emerged from the world of newspapers (as Thurber did); a few from the underbelly of The New Yorker itself. So if you are unable to land a wounded-gorilla role, you might seek employment as a writer. And you needn’t restrict yourself to print. A number of classic New Yorker humorists—such as Benchley, Parker, Perelman, and later, in an unexampled way, Woody Allen—spent time writing for movies or television. That’s true, as well, about many more recent contributors, such as Paul Rudnick, Patricia Marx, Andy Borowitz, Larry Doyle, Paul Simms, and Yoni Brenner. For them, having suckled at the golden teat and grown rich off The New Yorker, working in Hollywood is a way of giving back to the community. It’s a heartening tradition, and we salute their generosity.
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