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?
Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker Page 1