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

by Finder, Henry

  Tonight I’ll know one thing. If I hear that rapping, that rapping on my chamber door, and I’m sitting there. Still sitting there, pondering over a big pile of quaint and curious volumes. If I’m still sitting there, I’ll know one thing: The record is now straight.

  1985

  SUSAN ORLEAN

  MY LIFE: A SERIES OF PRIVATELY FUNDED PERFORMANCE-ART PIECES

  1. BIRTH

  As the piece opens, another performance artist, “Mom” (an affiliate of my private funding source) waits onstage, consuming tuna-noodle casseroles. Eventually, she leaves the initial performance site—a single-family Cape Cod decorated with amoeboid sofas, Herman Miller coconut chairs, boomerang-print linoleum, and semi-shag carpeting—for a second site, a hospital. There she is joined by a sterile-clad self-realized figure of authority (“Sidney Jaffe, M.D.”) who commands her to “push,” and then externalizes through language and gesture his desire to return to the back nine. This tableau makes allusion to the deadening, depersonalizing, postwar “good life.” “Mom” continues “pushing,” and at last I enter—nude. I do this in a manner that confronts yet at the same time steers clear of all obscenity statutes.

  2. COMING HOME EXTREMELY LATE BECAUSE I WAS MAKING SNOW ANGELS AND FORGOT TO STOP

  Again, an ensemble piece. But unlike “Birth,” which explores the universal codes of pleasure and vulnerability, “Coming Home Extremely Late” is a manifesto about rage—not mine but that of the protonuclear family. The cast includes “Mom,” “David,” “Debra,” “Fluffy,” and my private funding source. In “Coming Home,” I become Object, rather than Subject.

  The piece is also a metaperformance; the more sophisticated members of the audience will realize that I am “coming home extremely late” because of another performance: “Snow Angels,” an earlier, gestural work in which, clothed in a cherry-red Michelin Man–style snowsuit, I lower myself into a snowbank and wave my arms up and down, leaving a winged-creature-like impression upon the frozen palimpsest. Owing to my methodology, I am better at it than anyone on the block. Note the megatextual references to Heaven, Superior Being–as-girl-child, snow-as-inviolable-purity, and time-as-irrelevancy. “Coming Home Extremely Late” concludes with a choral declaration from the entire cast (except for my private funding source, who has returned to reading the sports section), titled “You Are Grounded for a Month, Young Lady.”

  3. I GO THROUGH A GANGLY PERIOD

  A sustained dramatic piece, lasting three to five years, depending on how extensively the performer pursues the orthodontia theme. Besides me, the cast includes the entire student population of Byron Junior High School, Shaker Heights, Ohio—especially the boys. In the course of “Gangly Period,” I grow large in some ways, small in others, and, ironically, they are all the wrong ways. I receive weird haircuts. Through “crabby” behavior (mostly directed at my private funding source), my noncontextual stage image projects the unspeakable fear that I am not “popular.” In a surreal trope midway through the performance, I vocalize to a small section of the cast (“Ellen Fisher,” “Sally Webb,” and “Heather Siegel”) my lack of knowledge about simple sexual practices.

  Throughout the piece, much commentary about time: how long it is, why certain things seem to take forever, why I have to be the absolutely last girl in the entire seventh grade to get Courrèges boots.

  4. FINDING MYSELF

  This piece is a burlesque—a comic four-year-long high art/low art exploration. As “Finding Myself” opens, I am on-site—a paradigmatic bourgeois college campus. After performing the symbiotic ritual of “meeting my roommates” and dialoguing about whether boyfriends can stay overnight in our room, I reject the outmoded, parasitic escape route of majoring in English, and instead dare to enroll in a class called “Low Energy Living,” in which I reject the outmoded, parasitic escape route of reading the class material and instead build a miniature solar-powered seawater-desalinization plant. I then confront Amerika’s greedy soullessness by enrolling in a class called “Future Worlds,” walking around in a space suit of my own design, doing a discursive/nonlinear monologue on Buckminster Fuller and futurism.

  Toward the end of “Finding Myself,” I skip all my “classes”—spatially as well as temporally—and move into an alternative environment to examine my “issues.” At this point, my private funding source actually appears in the piece and, in a witty cameo, threatens to withdraw my grant. Much implosive controversy. To close the performance, I sit on an avocado-green beanbag chair and simulate “applying to graduate school.”

  5. I GET MARRIED AND SHORTLY THEREAFTER TAKE A POUNDING IN THE REAL-ESTATE MARKET

  A bifurcated work. First, another performance artist, “Peter,” dialogues with me about the explicit, symbolic, and functional presentations of human synchronism. We then plan and execute a suburban country-club wedding (again, with assistance from my private funding source). Making a conceptual critique of materialism, I “register” for Royal Copenhagen china, Baccarat crystal, and Kirk Stieff sterling. Syllabic chants, fragments of unintelligible words like the screeches of caged wild birds gone mad—this megatonality erupts when I confront my private funding source about seating certain little-liked relatives. At the work’s interactive climax, “Peter” and I explode the audience/performer dialectic and invite the audience to join as we “perform the ceremony.”

  The second part of the piece—a six-month-long open-ended manifesto on the specificity of place—culminates with “Peter” and me purchasing a four-and-a-half-room coöperative apartment with a good address in Manhattan. Conran’s furniture, Krups appliances, task-specific gadgets (apple corers, pasta makers, shrimp deveiners), and other symbol-laden icons are arranged on-site. Curtain goes down on the performers facing each other on a sofa, holding a Times real-estate section between them, doing a performative discourse lamenting that they have “purchased the apartment at the peak of the market.”

  The series will continue pending refinancing.

  1990

  DAVID BROOKS

  THE A-LIST E-LIST

  I SPEND my days trying to contribute to a more just, caring, and environmentally sensitive society, but, like most Americans, I’m always on the lookout for subtle ways to make myself seem socially superior. So I was thrilled recently to learn about E-name dropping, a new and extremely petty form of one-upmanship made possible by recent strides in information technology.

  I first became aware of this new status ploy when a colleague sent out a mass message. “Dear friends,” his E-mail began. But before I could go on to the text my eye was drawn up to the list of other people it had been sent to. My friend had apparently sent this message—it was a request for help on an article—to his entire E-mail address book. There were three hundred and four names, listed alphabetically, along with their E-mail addresses. It was like a roster of young media meritocrats. There were newsweek.coms, wsj.coms, nytimes.coms, as well as your assorted berkeley.edus, stanford.edus, microsoft.coms, and even a UN.org.

  I realized that I had stumbled across the Social Register of the information age. We all carry our own select social clubs on our hard drives, and when we send out a mass mailing we can flaunt our splendiferous connections to arouse the envy of friend and foe alike. It’s as if you were walking down the street with your Rolodex taped to your lapel—only better, since having an E-mail friendship with someone suggests that you are trading chatty badinage, not just exchanging stiff missives under a formal letterhead.

  So in theory a strategic striver could structure his E-mail address list to reveal the entire trajectory of his career ascent. He could include a few of his early thesis advisers—groton.org, yale.edu, oxford.ac.uk—then a few internship-era mentors—imf.org, whitehouse.gov—and, finally, a few social/professional contacts—say, davosconference.com or trilat.org. When he inflicts this list on his friends’ in-boxes, they will be compelled, like unwilling list archeologists, to retrace his perfect life, triumph by triumph.

  My friend with th
e three-hundred-and-four-name list hadn’t exploited the full potentialities of the genre, so I cast about for other lists and began to analyze them. I learned a lot from these lists. For example, my view of The Nation’s columnist Eric Alterman has been transformed by the knowledge that he has just stopped using “Tomseaver” as part of his E-mail address. But, frankly, reading through the address lists of my friends, I found that there were longueurs. Entire passages were filled with names of insignificant people, such as family members I’d never heard of. I came to realize, as Capability Brown must have, that in the making of any beautiful vista pruning is key.

  If Aristotle were alive, he would note that there are four types of E-mail lists. There are lists that remind you that the sender went to a better college than you did. There are lists that remind you that he has a better job than you do. There are those that remind you that he has more sex than you do. And, finally, there are those that remind you that he is better than you in every respect: spiritually, professionally, and socially.

  I have begun fantasizing about assembling the mother of all E-mail lists, the sort that would be accumulated by a modern Renaissance man. Such a list would be studded with jewels (HisHoliness@vatican.com, QEII@windsor.org). But, more than that, it would suggest a series of high achievements across the full range of human endeavor. It would include whopping hints about mysterious other lives (coupboy@theagency.gov, Ahmed@mujahedin.com). It would reveal intimate connections with the great but socially selective (JDSal@aol.com, Solzhenits@archi.org). Of course, I wouldn’t want only celebrities on my list; that would be vulgar. I would leave room for talk-show bookers, upper-bracket realtors, Sherpas, airline presidents, night-club publicists, rain-forest tour guides, underprivileged kids, members of the Gotti family, and a rotating contingent of the people I actually know, for whose edification the whole list has been constructed in the first place.

  To take advantage of this list, I would need excuses to send out mass mailings as frequently as possible. I would have to change my address a lot (“From now on you can reach me at genius24@MacArthurgrant.com . . .”). I would send out a lot of general queries (“Does anybody know who is handling Ike Berlin’s estate? I’m trying to find a first edition of the complete works of Hérzen . . .”). And I’d send out a few accidental mass mailings by hitting the Reply All button by “mistake” (“Your Holiness, it turns out I can’t make it to Rome Tuesday. Maybe somebody else can bring the beer and soda . . .”).

  No longer would I be the ninety-eight-pound cyberweakling that I am now. Alec Baldwin would start sending me dirty jokes in hopes of making it onto my E-mail list. People would actually begin replying to my messages. The fact is, in the new information age, we can now be snobs on a scale never dreamed of by our ancestors. Is this a great time to be alive, or what?

  1999

  THE

  WAR

  BETWEEN

  MEN

  AND

  WOMEN

  JAMES THURBER

  MR. PREBLE GETS RID OF HIS WIFE

  MR. PREBLE was a plump middle-aged lawyer in Scarsdale. He used to kid with his stenographer about running away with him. “Let’s run away together,” he would say, during a pause in dictation. “All righty,” she would say.

  One rainy Monday afternoon, Mr. Preble was more serious about it than usual.

  “Let’s run away together,” said Mr. Preble.

  “All righty,” said his stenographer. Mr. Preble jingled the keys in his pocket and looked out the window.

  “My wife would be glad to get rid of me,” he said.

  “Would she give you a divorce?” asked the stenographer.

  “I don’t suppose so,” he said. The stenographer laughed.

  “You’d have to get rid of your wife,” she said.

  MR. PREBLE was unusually silent at dinner that night. About half an hour after coffee, he spoke without looking up from his paper.

  “Let’s go down in the cellar,” Mr. Preble said to his wife.

  “What for?” she said, not looking up from her book.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “We never go down in the cellar any more. The way we used to.”

  “We never did go down in the cellar that I remember,” said Mrs. Preble. “I could rest easy the balance of my life if I never went down in the cellar.” Mr. Preble was silent for several minutes.

  “Supposing I said it meant a whole lot to me,” began Mr. Preble.

  “What’s come over you?” his wife demanded. “It’s cold down there and there is absolutely nothing to do.”

  “We could pick up pieces of coal,” said Mr. Preble. “We might get up some kind of a game with pieces of coal.”

  “I don’t want to,” said his wife. “Anyway, I’m reading.”

  “Listen,” said Mr. Preble, rising and walking up and down. “Why won’t you come down in the cellar? You can read down there, as far as that goes.”

  “There isn’t a good enough light down there,” she said, “and anyway, I’m not going to go down in the cellar. You may as well make up your mind to that.”

  “Gee whiz!” said Mr. Preble, kicking at the edge of a rug. “Other people’s wives go down in the cellar. Why is it you never want to do anything? I come home worn out from the office and you won’t even go down in the cellar with me. God knows it isn’t very far—it isn’t as if I was asking you to go to the movies or some place.”

  “I don’t want to go!” shouted Mrs. Preble. Mr. Preble sat down on the edge of a davenport.

  “All right, all right,” he said. He picked up the newspaper again. “I wish you’d let me tell you more about it. It’s—kind of a surprise.”

  “Will you quit harping on that subject?” asked Mrs. Preble.

  “LISTEN,” said Mr. Preble, leaping to his feet. “I might as well tell you the truth instead of beating around the bush. I want to get rid of you so I can marry my stenographer. Is there anything especially wrong about that? People do it every day. Love is something you can’t control—”

  “We’ve been all over that,” said Mrs. Preble. “I’m not going to go all over that again.”

  “I just wanted you to know how things are,” said Mr. Preble. “But you have to take everything so literally. Good Lord, do you suppose I really wanted to go down in the cellar and make up some silly game with pieces of coal?”

  “I never believed that for a minute,” said Mrs. Preble. “I knew all along you wanted to get me down there and bury me.”

  “You can say that now—after I told you,” said Mr. Preble. “But it would never have occurred to you if I hadn’t.”

  “You didn’t tell me; I got it out of you,” said Mrs. Preble. “Anyway, I’m always two steps ahead of what you’re thinking.”

  “You’re never within a mile of what I’m thinking,” said Mr. Preble.

  “Is that so? I knew you wanted to bury me the minute you set foot in this house tonight.” Mrs. Preble held him with a glare.

  “Now that’s just plain damn exaggeration,” said Mr. Preble, considerably annoyed. “You knew nothing of the sort. As a matter of fact, I never thought of it till just a few minutes ago.”

  “It was in the back of your mind,” said Mrs. Preble. “I suppose this filing woman put you up to it.”

  “You needn’t get sarcastic,” said Mr. Preble. “I have plenty of people to file without having her file. She doesn’t know anything about this. She isn’t in on it. I was going to tell her you had gone to visit some friends and fell over a cliff. She wants me to get a divorce.”

  “That’s a laugh,” said Mrs. Preble. “That’s a laugh. You may bury me, but you’ll never get a divorce.”

  “She knows that; I told her that,” said Mr. Preble. “I mean—I told her I’d never get a divorce.”

  “Oh, you probably told her about burying me, too,” said Mrs. Preble.

  “That’s not true,” said Mr. Preble, with dignity. “That’s between you and me. I was never going to tell a soul.”

&nb
sp; “You’d blab it to the whole world; don’t tell me,” said Mrs. Preble. “I know you.” Mr. Preble puffed at his cigar.

  “I wish you were buried now and it was all over with,” he said.

  “Don’t you suppose you would get caught, you crazy thing?” she said. “They always get caught. Why don’t you go to bed? You’re just getting yourself all worked up over nothing.”

  “I’m not going to bed,” said Mr. Preble. “I’m going to bury you in the cellar. I’ve got my mind made up to it. I don’t know how I could make it any plainer.”

  “Listen,” cried Mrs. Preble, throwing her book down, “will you be satisfied and shut up if I go down in the cellar? Can I have a little peace if I go down in the cellar? Will you let me alone then?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Preble. “But you spoil it by taking that attitude.”

  “Sure, sure, I always spoil everything. I stop reading right in the middle of a chapter. I’ll never know how the story comes out—but that’s nothing to you.”

  “Did I make you start reading the book?” asked Mr. Preble. He opened the cellar door. “Here, you go first.”

  “BRRR,” said Mrs. Preble, starting down the steps. “It’s cold down here! You would think of this, at this time of year! Any other husband would have buried his wife in the summer.”

  “You can’t arrange those things just whenever you want to,” said Mr. Preble. “I didn’t fall in love with this girl till late fall.”

  “Anybody else would have fallen in love with her long before that. She’s been around for years. Why is it you always let other men get in ahead of you? Mercy, but it’s dirty down here! What have you got there?”

  “I was going to hit you over the head with this shovel,” said Mr. Preble.