by Larry Doyle
The following pieces were originally published in the New Yorker: Fun Times!; Me v. Big Mike; Sleeper Camp; May We Tell You Our Specials This Evening?; Disengagements; Life Without Leann: A Newsletter; Portrait in Evil: My Story; Adventures in Experimentation; I Killed Them in New Haven; Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One; Notes on My Next Bestseller; Let’s Talk About My New Movie; Last of the Cro-Magnons*; Why We Strike; We Request the Honor of Your Presence at GywnnandDaveShareTheirJoy.com; Bad Dog; What Am I Going to Do with My Mega Millions?; Please Read Before Suing; I’m Afraid I Have Some Bad News; Is There a Problem Here?; You Won’t Have Nixon to Kick Around Anymore, Dirtbag. In Esquire: Me: An Introduction*; My Heart: My Rules; You Asked for It*; The Larry Doyle Story As Told to Larry Doyle; An Open Letter to All Academy Members, Creative Artists, and Anyone Else Who Still Believes in Freedom of Expression; The Babyproofer; Freezer Madness. In the National Lampoon: Dating Tips*; Ask the Eight Ball; Are You Insane?; Media Culpa; Local Wag*; The Rest of the Story; Huck of Darkness; Then What?; Recent Supreme Court Decisions*; How to Handle Your Money*. On Popcornfiction.com: Whacking the Baby; Thank You for Considering My Cult. In Tin House: Freelance File. In Kugelmass: Eulogy for Bob. (*In a slightly, significantly, or dramatically different form.)
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-196683-5
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062096814
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* Fun Times!, formerly Fun Tymes, is not affiliated with Ye Olde Fun Tymes or the New York Times Company, and does not recognize their debts or financial obligations.
† The Jolly Trolley is not operated by the Fun Times! Company, which makes no warrants as to its driver, Glenn, or to the final destination of the Trolley.
‡ Epileptics should not take a look around.
§ Ladies, please note: Dr. Lungtissue is not a licensed physician.
** Goob™ is a proprietary peanut-based gel, which may contain traces of peanuts and whole peanuts still in the shell. People who are sensitive to peanuts and/or tree nuts should have read the waiver more carefully.
* J. B. Daniels, contract player for Hot Streaming Angel, of Van Nuys.
1. I would like to most gratefully acknowledge Vince Offer, the independent filmmaker who sued big Hollywood filmmakers Peter and Bobby Farrelly, accusing them of stealing jokes from his film The Underground Comedy Movie for their film There’s Something About Mary. His lawsuit provided important inspiration for this article.
2. Credit must go to professional jokester Sammy Haggis, whose comedic monologue contains this opening sentence, albeit in a slightly different form.
3. Although at the time of its creation, this tavern name was fully a work of the imagination, it has since been pointed out that other drinking establishments with this name actually exist in Boston, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
4. See “What the Who Is at the Zoo?” in Puppy Dog Tales, fall 1964, “Wag Bag” page, submitted by Michael Schrage, age seven.
5. Again: Haggis.
6. Credit for creating and naming this specialty drink has been variously attributed to Sebastian Dangerfield, a mixologist at the J.P. Ginger’s in Manhattan, and to Flo Wechek, owner of Babylon’s Hanging Beer Garden in Fort Repose, Florida.i
7. The aforementioned setup, accompanied by the retort “Straight up or on the rocks?” originally appeared in the shooting script of a 1988 Cheers episodeii but was excised by NBC censors.
8. See Ed McMahon, The Tonight Show, and his various fully protected lampooners.
9. While historically attributed to the old Jack Benny radio show, this phrase has American literary antecedents which include, but are not limited to, the works of Nathaniel West, Ambrose Bierce, and, of course, Mark Twain. In any event, this particular wording has since become part of the vernacular and can hardly be considered to be the intellectual property of any one author.
10. According to Robert L. Chapman’s New American Dictionary of American Slang, this term has been employed by Westbrook Pegler, the racist anti-Semite admired by Sarah Palin, among others.
11. This transitory sentence originally appeared in a different context in “The Annoying Foot-High Companion,” from A Thousand Men Walk into a Thousand Bars, edited by Isaac Asimov.
12. As anyone who reads the papers or watches Fox News must know by now, I have been accused by one “Jerry Grinn” of appropriating this entire humoresque from his book Grinn’s Big Comedy Treasury of Toasts, Roasts, Boasts, and Jests. I do not take these charges lightly. As a professional writer who derives a not inconsiderable portion of his income from his unique comic sensibility, I cannot. And so, rather than simply allowing these utterly unfounded accusations to die on the vine of bitter grapes from whence they were wrung, I have decided to take my case to the public.
First of all, let me state emphatically that I have not read Mr. Grinn’s book,iii nor do I intend to do so. However, I did recently receive a copy of the so-called “jest” I allegedly plagiarized in the mail, and I was frankly shocked that anyone could have given Mr. Grinn’s complaints a forum (as did the New York Post and the website Galley Cat, among others).
Mind you, I am not saying that there aren’t some similarities between our pieces—the limited conventions of the comic story virtually guarantee it—but I am saying that viewed in whole, rather than in carefully selected “excerpts,” it becomes clear that there is precious little to link our work and far more that distinguishes it. To wit:
1) “Just the other day, I was having a drink.” All of the stories in the Treasury, including the one from which these opening remarks were allegedly lifted, are told in the third person. My story, on the other hand, is a first-person narrative, making it less a jest than an anecdote. Grinn’s episode is also cast in the past tense, while mine moves imperceptibly from past to present, an experimental-fiction technique that lends the piece a contemporariness that Grinn’s entire volume lacks.
2) “Mulligan’s Brew over on Forty-Third Street.” A detail curiously missing from the supposedly purloined text.
3) “Pink-and-purple kangaroo.” An intensely personal allusion to my own childhood, predating the Treasury by a good twenty years, and giving the whole a surreal quality that Grinn’s garden-variety kangaroo fails to provoke.
4) “Barkeep, give me a Screaming Orgasm.” Note the wording in the Grinn version: “Bartender, I’d like a Piña Colada.” A Screaming Orgasm is not only a more contemporary reference, but it frames the entire episode in a double-entendre context, making it more of an adult tale, in stark contrast to Grinn’s rather childlike prose.
5) “So [the bartender, when asked how much the drink costs,] says, ‘Twenty bucks.’” In Grinn’s version, it is only five dollars—a small detail perhaps, but try this joke out on a New York audience using the lower figure and see how many people appreciate the hyperbole.
6) “[The kangaroo] hops off his stool to leave.” A mere flourish, admittedly, yet like m
any others throughout the piece, a telling one.
7) Note the clear difference in cadence between “We’ve never had a talking kangaroo in here before” (Grinn version) and “We’ve never had a talking pink-and-purple kangaroo in here before”(Doyle version).
8) In the final analysis, the real proof is in the punch line. Grinn: “‘I’m not surprised,’ the kangaroo angrily retorted, ‘and if you keep charging five dollars for a Piña Colada, you won’t have any others, I’ll tell you that.’” Doyle: “‘Well,’ the kangaroo says. ‘At twenty bucks for one lousy Screaming Orgasm, I’m not a bit surprised.’” In addition to its afore-mentioned contemporary and ribald qualities, my version is certainly more parsimonious than Grinn’s run-at-the-mouth gagism. Further, it displays that ineffable quality that separates the ridiculous from the sublime, a chuckle from a guffaw—timing. I could go on, but I think I’ll leave the relentless self-posturing to Mr. Grinn. And to those who still believe his reckless charges of plagiarism, I can think of no more appropriate response than to quote something my university creative writing teacher, Mark Costello, once told me. “Larry,” he said, “always remember: mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.”
i. The bartenders and drinking establishments in this note are literary allusions to J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, respectively.
ii. Although the joke may have itself been appropriated in whole or in part from Shticks and Grins, a 1979 revue performed by the Hasty Pudding Club of Harvard University.
iii. In the interest of full disclosure, I must point out that I met Mr. Grinn once, at a 2005 New York magazine party celebrating the magazine’s “100 Wittiest New Yorkers.” (No, I didn’t make the list, but I do not have the good fortune of being a client of Leslee Dart, as were a striking sixty-three of our city’s wittiest, including Mr. Grinn.) I cannot recall if Mr. Grinn told the joke in dispute at this gathering, as I was, to be perfectly frank, quite drunk. I was also unaware that Mr. Grinn was married, or that Marie was his wife.
During our subsequent time together, Marie never related to me Mr. Grinn’s precious joke, or, for that matter, any precious jest belonging to her former husband, whom she found to be dour and petty, and who never made her laugh. She is willing to sign an affidavit to this effect.
1. See also Larry Doyle’s “Huck Finn’s Search for His Identity,” a five-page, double-spaced monograph, Advanced Composition II, Ms. Rosenbaum, Rm. A113, February 1974.
2. See Fiedler’s “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” which first appeared in Partisan Review, June 1948, but which also provides the text for a new one-man show starring Terrence Howard, currently playing in Key West in the Tennessee Williams Theater’s upper mezzanine men’s room.
3. See Sire, Vol. 12, No. 130, italicized introduction, above.
4. The phrase “zany ‘lost episodes’” does not appear in the original draft of this article and was apparently added for “commercial reasons” over the objections of the author. The author’s intended locution, which should be restored in future editions, was “Finn-tastic philological finds.”
5. Although these two groups are not mutually exclusive, as longtime readers of this magazine are well aware. See especially Norman Mailer’s “Mammarian Signifying: The Ironic Nipple,” foreword to Sire’s This Is Booberama! (1977), a book of photographic essays.
6. Librarians please note: unauthorized copying is illegal. However, additional copies of this magazine can be purchased at newsstands and book-stores across the country.
7. Pike County dialect for “father,” possibly derived from the Euro-Mediterranean “papa” or Middle-American “pop.”
8. Huck’s self-report.
9. Based on Huck’s anecdotal evidence, medical authorities believe Pap’s blood-alcohol content may have been between 0.21 and 0.24, more than double the level required to have him arrested for drunk driving, had auto-mobiles been invented and had he been driving one at the time, although the technology to determine this was not yet available during the period in which this incident takes place, and so we must take Huck’s (and Twain’s) word for it that Pap was, in fact, intoxicated.
10. While Olivia was diligent in patrolling Twain’s work for strong language, his sexual allusions often went right by her. See, for example, Twain’s Roughing It.
11. Much has been written elsewhere about why Twain chose this ethnic nomenclature over the currently acceptable “African American” (See “Long-home [sic] Clemens: Racist Devil,” an anonymous Black paper distributed free at libraries, airports, and bus depots), but in Twain’s defense, it should be noted that, at the time, everybody called them niggers.
12. Doyle, op. cit.
13. Ask anybody.
14. An early editor of this article suggested replacing the phrase “psycho-sexual import” with the word “oomph,” arguing that the author’s use of the former amounted to “soporific pedantry,” a characterization the author subsequently deemed “masturbatory fustianism,” precipitating a heated exchange of rhetorical devices and body blows. Please note the final wording.
15. One might speculate that Twain did not wish to be jailed as a pornographer, but there is little documentary evidence to support this. In fact, Sire had already published far more explicit material two years earlier, when it serialized the long-suppressed final book of C. Dodgson’s childhood trilogy, Down My Trousers; and What Alice Fond There.
16. You can Google it just as well as I can.
17. One story, possibly apocryphal, relates that the first installment of Finn, as submitted to Sire, originally began, “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; so here might be a good place for me to tell you what happened in that one be-fore I take up with this one,” followed by a six-thousand-word summary of Sawyer from Huck’s point of view. According to magazine legend, founding editor Peter Van Oppenclause red-penciled everything after “Tom Sawyer,” replacing it with the now more familiar “but that ain’t no matter.”
18. Huck’s superstitious aversion to snakes is a recurring theme in the book. In chapter X, for example, Huck swears he “wouldn’t ever take aholt of a skin again with my hands, now that I see what come of it.” And yet, as this passage makes clear, he can’t seem to avoid them.
19. When Huck tells Jim, “You couldn’t a got drunk … so of course you’ve been dreaming,” he is making a sly reference to the previous evening, a reference that readers, until now, have been unable to enjoy. It is difficult to imagine how much more satisfying this passage, and consequently the entire novel, might have been had the Dream Sequence been intact from the very beginning. The book very well might have sold better, and Twain would not have been forced, as he was in later life, to write for television.
20. Twain apparently chose several other words before settling on this one, but they are too heavily marked out to be deciphered.
21. Again, as above. In a couple of instances, Twain’s alternative wordings are so vigorously edited that he actually tore a hole in the manuscript.
22. “Me” in the original draft.
23. Manufactured quotation.
24. And in fact, he missed several installments altogether; these were supplied by contributing editor Charles Dickens, who, as usual, needed the money. Twain was either too proud to allow these episodes to appear in his book or could not come to terms with Dickens, but these outrageously entertaining Finn chapters later supplied the inspiration for Dickens’s minor master-piece Beast House.
25. During which he reportedly slept at the magazine’s offices, not bathing once. Some say Twain’s aura still lingers there to this day.
* Cf. “The Babyproofer,” which was written after I had a child.
* Cf. “I Killed Them in New Haven,” a later version without the excruciation.
* Like He’s Your Best Friend
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