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

by Finder, Henry

  Most “humor pieces”—casuals, or the sort of piece that in today’s New Yorker runs under the rubric Shouts & Murmurs—are short: canapés, not steaks. These are mostly what you’ll find here: pieces that have some specific density of wit or are governed by a comic premise. And yet some of the finest instances of humor are, one might say, incidental (though incidental in an integral way) to a work of journalism. These are nonfiction narratives where, in the words of Calvin Trillin, “the jokes sometimes are suspended for the lamentable necessity of transferring a little information to the reader.” Our decision to scant such pieces means that some of our funniest contributors aren’t represented. We’ve already beaten ourselves up over this, so don’t feel you have to. Likewise, we generally gave a cold shoulder to short stories. We did so out of the kind of anxiety that inspires trade quotas: if we opened our doors to their authors, we’d be inundated with scarily deserving contenders—from Sally Benson to George Saunders—and hardworking native humorists would be put out of work. Hence our recourse to such protectionist edicts as would put the Hawley-Smoot Act to shame. Having established these firm ground rules, naturally, we proceeded to violate them, dutifully proving the rule with its necessary exceptions.

  Rules, anyway, get you only so far. Occasionally, we found that a comic tour de force required a slightly greater familiarity with Van Wyck Brooks or Frank Harris than could now be assumed; nor do we apologize for omitting a dead-on parody of James Branch Cabell. There were instances in which reclamation would have amounted to cruelty, in a whatever-happened-to-Baby-Jane sort of way. Some classics are best appreciated in the diffuse, amber light of distant recollection, and we honored them by not disturbing their repose. And, of course, a great deal of the most ingenious and uproarious work is, by design, topical; it belongs to a particular place and time. This is not said invidiously. The vaunted “test of time” is a circular one: all the test of time really tells you is whether something has survived the test of time. Unless strontium 90 is to be preferred to sunflowers, perishability is no disgrace. But these concerns applied only to a minority of cases. In truth, there were hundreds of pieces we’d love to have included, had we not—vide deforestation, the greenhouse gases—loved the planet more. “I must get back to the office and reject,” John Mosher used to say to his lunch companions. The poor fellow. We thought about him a lot.

  “WHEN you are creeping through the literary underbrush hoping to bag a piece of humor with your net, nothing seems funny,” Russell Baker wrote in a preface to an anthology of American humor that he compiled. “The thing works the other way around. Humor is funny when it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise.”

  Yes, funny writing is funny that way. Defying the laws of nature, humor is often diluted by concentration. So you might be ill-advised to read this book straight through. Consider this, rather, a prescription of antibiotics, to be rationed out over a period of time, not knocked back all at once. Consider it a fridge full of food, and put yourself on a diet. Print is a perilous medium, so precautions must be taken. When stand-up comedians play to a club, there’s usually a two-drink minimum, which means they’re extracting laughs from a pleasantly sozzled audience. Are you pleasantly sozzled? We worry about these things. We worry about the sated reader who turns pages out of obligation, as stone-faced as an Easter Island moai.

  This collection is divided into categories that reflect a few salient preoccupations of the contributors. We’d like to pretend these categories represent a definitive taxonomy. In truth, given the amount of overlap, the exercise was more like assigning students to a homeroom. Still, one distinction did seem useful: we wanted to segregate pieces that are basically witty but truthful essays or recollections from those that are basically fictive conceits (as most of them are). You don’t want to have to get to the fourth paragraph to figure out that the voice is the author’s, not some apparently soigné narrator whose lofty tones will devolve into utter lunacy before the piece is over. Reflections and recollections, however various, have thus been placed in administrative custody for their own protection and yours. But beyond this? We laboriously organized the contents in a cunning, intricate sequence so that you could enjoy the transgressive thrill of reading them out of order.

  IN gathering these pieces, we somehow racked up more debts than a first-term congressman. Thanks, first and foremost, are due C. S. Ledbetter, one of the institution’s true stalwarts, who made his way through the depths of the New Yorker archives like a foraging Egyptologist equipped with hand trowel and toothbrush. Mr. Ledbetter is alert even to ironies pitched beyond the normal range of human hearing. Thanks, also, to Susan Morrison, for her stewardship of the Shouts & Murmurs department and her attentive egg-candling of the magazine’s more recent offerings. To Pamela Maffei McCarthy and Edward Klaris, for ensuring that these pieces could be reprinted legally and by a publishing house, rather than illegally and by a campus-based file-sharing system. To Alice Quinn, for her sensitive sifting through of the magazine’s light and lightish and not all that light verse. To Christopher Shay and Erin Overbey of the magazine’s library, for assistance of every variety. We’re particularly indebted to Leo Carey, Dana Goodyear, and Brenda Phipps, who were responsible for the Notes on Contributors (assisted by Jacob Goldstein, Chuck Wilson, and Austin Kelley), and who kept the project on the rails.

  This book of humor writing further benefited from the advice of some of the most distinguished practitioners of the art: Roger Angell, Nancy Franklin, Ian Frazier, Adam Gopnik, Charles McGrath, Calvin Trillin, and John Updike. We are also grateful to Daniel Menaker, a New Yorker veteran as well as the book’s editor at Random House. To have counsellors and kibbitzers of such distinction is indeed a privilege: it means we can claim responsibility for all remaining oversights, confident that readers will see through our affected modesty and assign the blame elsewhere.

  SPOOFS

  WOLCOTT GIBBS

  DEATH IN THE RUMBLE SEAT

  WITH THE USUAL APOLOGIES TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY, WHO MUST BE PRETTY SICK OF THIS SORT OF THING

  MOST people don’t like the pedestrian part, and it is best not to look at that if you can help it. But if you can’t help seeing them, long-legged and their faces white, and then the shock and the car lifting up a little on one side, then it is best to think of it as something very unimportant but beautiful and necessary artistically. It is unimportant because the people who are pedestrians are not very important, and if they were not being cogido by automobiles it would just be something else. And it is beautiful and necessary because, without the possibility of somebody getting cogido, driving a car would be just like anything else. It would be like reading “Thanatopsis,” which is neither beautiful nor necessary, but hogwash. If you drive a car, and don’t like the pedestrian part, then you are one of two kinds of people. Either you haven’t very much vitality and you ought to do something about it, or else you are yellow and there is nothing to be done about it at all.

  IF you don’t know anything about driving cars you are apt to think a driver is good just because he goes fast. This may be very exciting at first, but afterwards there is a bad taste in the mouth and the feeling of dishonesty. Ann Bender, the American, drove as fast on the Merrick Road as anybody I have ever seen, but when cars came the other way she always worked out of their terrain and over in the ditch so that you never had the hard, clean feeling of danger, but only bumping up and down in the ditch, and sometimes hitting your head on the top of the car. Good drivers go fast too, but it is always down the middle of the road, so that cars coming the other way are dominated, and have to go in the ditch themselves. There are a great many ways of getting the effect of danger, such as staying in the middle of the road till the last minute and then swerving out of the pure line, but they are all tricks, and afterwards you know they were tricks, and there is nothing left but disgust.

  The cook: I am a little tired of cars, sir. Do you know any stories?

  I know a great many stories, but I’m not sure th
at they’re suitable.

  The cook: The hell with that.

  Then I will tell you the story about God and Adam and naming the animals. You see, God was very tired after he got through making the world. He felt good about it, but he was tired so he asked Adam if he’d mind thinking up names for the animals.

  “What animals?” Adam said.

  “Those,” God said.

  “Do they have to have names?” Adam said.

  “You’ve got a name, haven’t you?” God said.

  I could see—

  The cook: How do you get into this?

  Some people always write in the first person, and if you do it’s very hard to write any other way, even when it doesn’t altogether fit into the context. If you want to hear this story, don’t keep interrupting.

  The cook: O.K.

  I could see that Adam thought God was crazy, but he didn’t say anything. He went over to where the animals were, and after a while he came back with the list of names.

  “Here you are,” he said.

  God read the list, and nodded.

  “They’re pretty good,” he said. “They’re all pretty good except that last one.”

  “That’s a good name,” Adam said. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “What do you want to call it an elephant for?,” God said.

  Adam looked at God.

  “It looks like an elephant to me,” he said.

  The cook: Well?

  That’s all.

  The cook: It is a very strange story, sir.

  It is a strange world, and if a man and a woman love each other, that is strange too, and what is more, it always turns out badly.

  In the golden age of car-driving, which was about 1910, the sense of impending disaster, which is a very lovely thing and almost nonexistent, was kept alive in a number of ways. For one thing, there was always real glass in the windshield so that if a driver hit anything, he was very definitely and beautifully cogido. The tires weren’t much good either, and often they’d blow out before you’d gone ten miles. Really, the whole car was built that way. It was made not only so that it would precipitate accidents but so that when the accidents came it was honestly vulnerable, and it would fall apart, killing all the people with a passion that was very fine to watch. Then they began building the cars so that they would go much faster, but the glass and the tires were all made so that if anything happened it wasn’t real danger, but only the false sense of it. You could do all kinds of things with the new cars, but it was no good because it was all planned in advance. Mickey Finn, the German, always worked very far into the other car’s terrain so that the two cars always seemed to be one. Driving that way he often got the faender, or the clicking when two cars touch each other in passing, but because you knew that nothing was really at stake it was just an empty classicism, without any value because the insecurity was all gone and there was nothing left but a kind of mechanical agility. It is the same way when any art gets into its decadence. It is the same way about s-x—

  The cook: I like it very much better when you talk about s-x, sir, and I wish you would do it more often.

  I have talked a lot about s-x before, and now I thought I would talk about something else.

  The cook: I think that is very unfortunate, sir, because you are at your best with s-x, but when you talk about automobiles you are just a nuisance.

  1932

  E. B. WHITE

  DUSK IN FIERCE PAJAMAS

  RAVAGED by pink eye, I lay for a week scarce caring whether I lived or died. Only Wamba, my toothless old black nurse, bothered to bring me food and quinine. Then one day my strength began to return, and with it came Wamba to my bedside with a copy of Harper’s Bazaar and a copy of Vogue. “Ah brought you couple magazines,” she said proudly, her red gums clashing.

  In the days that followed (happy days of renewed vigor and reawakened interest), I studied the magazines and lived, in their pages, the gracious lives of the characters in the ever-moving drama of society and fashion. In them I found surcease from the world’s ugliness, from disarray, from all unattractive things. Through them I escaped into a world in which there was no awkwardness of gesture, no unsuitability of line, no people of no importance. It was an enriching experience. I realize now that my own life is by contrast an unlovely thing, with its disease, its banalities, its uncertainties, its toil, its single-breasted suits, and its wine from lesser years. I am aware of a life all around me of graciousness and beauty, in which every moment is a tiny pearl of good taste, and in which every acquaintance has the common decency to possess a good background.

  Lying here in these fierce pajamas, I dream of the Harper’s Bazaar world, the Vogue life; dream of being a part of it. In fancy I am in Mrs. Cecil Baker’s pine-panelled drawing-room. It is dusk. (It is almost always dusk in the fashion magazines.) I have on a Gantner & Mattern knit jersey bathing suit with a flat-striped bow and an all-white buck shoe with a floppy tongue. No, that’s wrong. I am in chiffon, for it is the magic hour after bridge. Suddenly a Chippendale mahogany hors-d’œuvre table is brought in. In its original old blue-and-white Spode compartments there sparkle olives, celery, hard-boiled eggs, radishes—evidently put there by somebody in the employ of Mrs. Baker. Or perhaps my fancy wanders away from the drawing-room: I am in Mrs. Baker’s dining-room, mingling unostentatiously with the other guests, my elbows resting lightly on the dark polished oak of the Jacobean table, my fingers twiddling with the early Georgian silver. Or perhaps I am not at Mrs. Baker’s oak table in chiffon at all—perhaps instead I am at Mrs. Jay Gould’s teakwood table in a hand-knitted Anny Blatt ensemble in diluted tri-colors and an off-the-face hat.

  It is dusk. I am dining with Rose Hobart at the Waldorf. We have lifted our champagne glasses. “To sentiment!” I say. And the haunting dusk is shattered by the clean glint of jewels by Cartier.

  It is dusk. I am seated on a Bruce Buttfield pouf, for it is dusk.

  Ah, magazine dreams! How dear to me now are the four evenings in the life of Mrs. Allan Ryan, Junior. I have studied them one by one, and I feel that I know them. They are perfect little crystals of being—static, precious. There is the evening when she stands, motionless, in a magnificent sable cape, her left arm hanging gracefully at her side. She is ready to go out to dinner. What will this, her first of four evenings, bring of romance, or even of food? Then there is the evening when she just sits on the edge of a settee from the Modernage Galleries, the hard bright gleam of gold lamé topping a slim, straight, almost Empire skirt. I see her there (the smoke from a cigarette rising), sitting, sitting, waiting. Or the third evening—the evening with books. Mrs. Ryan is in chiffon; the books are in morocco. Or the fourth evening, standing with her dachshund, herself in profile, the dog in full face.

  So I live the lives of other people in my fancy: the life of the daughter of Lord Curzon of Kedleston, who has been visiting the Harold Talbotts on Long Island. All I know of her is that she appeared one night at dinner, her beauty set off by the lustre of artificial satin and the watery fire of aquamarine. It is all I know, yet it is enough; for it is her one perfect moment in time and space, and I know about it, and it is mine.

  It is dusk. I am with Owen Johnson over his chafing dish. It is dusk. I am with Prince Matchabelli over his vodka. Or I am with the Countess de Forceville over her bridge tables. She and I have just pushed the tables against the wall and taken a big bite of gaspacho. Or I am with the Marquis de Polignac over his Pommery.

  How barren my actual life seems, when fancy fails me, here with Wamba over my quinine. Why am I not to be found at dusk, slicing black bread very thin, as William Powell does, to toast it and sprinkle it with salt? Why does not twilight find me (as it finds Mrs. Chester Burden) covering a table with salmon-pink linens on which I place only white objects, even to a white salt shaker? Why don’t I learn to simplify my entertaining, like the young pinch-penny in Vogue, who has all his friends in before the theatre and simply gives them champagne cocktails, caviar,
and one hot dish, then takes them to the show? Why do I never give parties after the opera, as Mr. Paul Cravath does, at which I have the prettiest women in New York? Come to think of it, why don’t the prettiest women in New York ever come down to my place, other than that pretty little Mrs. Fazaenzi, whom Wamba won’t let in? Why haven’t I a butler named Fish, who makes a cocktail of three parts gin to one part lime juice, honey, vermouth, and apricot brandy in equal portions—a cocktail so delicious that people like Mrs. Harrison Williams and Mrs. Goodhue Livingston seek him out to get the formula? And if I did have a butler named Fish, wouldn’t I kid the pants off him?

  All over the world it is dusk! It is dusk at Armando’s on East Fifty-fifth Street. Armando has taken up his accordion; he is dreaming over the keys. A girl comes in, attracted by the accordion, which she mistakes for Cecil Beaton’s camera. She is in stiff green satin, and over it she wears a silver fox cape which she can pull around her shoulders later in the evening if she gets feeling like pulling a cape around her shoulders. It is dusk on the Harold Castles’ ranch in Hawaii. I have risen early to shoot a goat, which is the smart thing to do in Hawaii. And now I am walking silently through hedges of gardenias, past the flaming ginger flowers, for I have just shot a goat. I have on nothing but red sandals and a Martex bath towel. It is dusk in the Laurentians. I am in ski togs. I feel warm and safe, knowing that the most dangerous pitfall for skiers is color, knowing that although a touch of brilliance against the snow is effective, too much of it is the sure sign of the amateur. It is the magic hour before cocktails. I am in the modern penthouse of Monsieur Charles de Beistegui. The staircase is entirely of cement, spreading at the hem-line and trimmed with padded satin tubing caught at the neck with a bar of milk chocolate. It is dusk in Chicago. I am standing beside Mrs. Howard Linn, formerly Consuelo Vanderbilt, formerly Sophie M. Gay, formerly Ellen Glendinning, formerly Saks–Fifth Avenue. It is dusk! A pheasant has Julian Street down and is pouring a magnificent old red Burgundy down his neck. Dreams, I’m afraid. It is really dusk in my own apartment. I am down on my knees in front of an airbound radiator, trying to fix it by sticking pins in the vent. Dusk in these fierce pajamas. Kneeling here, I can’t help wondering where Nancy Yuille is, in her blue wool pants and reefer and her bright red mittens. For it is dusk. I said dusk, Wamba! Bring the quinine!