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

by Finder, Henry

  The big breakthrough in my style came in 1983. Until then, I had always carefully planned out what I was going to say in advance. What might happen if I simply responded on the spot to what people were saying? The results of these experiments in form surprised even me. An example, from a telephone conversation in late 1984:

  SHIRLEY: Hello?

  P.F.: (silence)

  SHIRLEY: HELLO?

  P.F.: (very long silence)

  At this point in the conversation, Shirley slammed down the receiver. I had never gotten this effect out of her before.

  Improvisation led me to question the role my friends were playing in my conversations, which I felt was much too great. I became interested in the idea of using non-friends—people who were no longer speaking to me, strangers, inanimate objects.

  MY LATE PERIOD

  By March 3, 1985, the cocktail party had become a moribund form—an exchange of anecdotes, business cards, lunch dates. Shallow gestures, devoid of meaning. People felt that when I walked toward them they were about to make a connection. No—I wanted to bring them face to face with something or other. (But what? I never could decide.)

  The listener had become passive. Telephone receivers were placed down on kitchen counters while listeners made trips to the refrigerator or thumbed through magazines. In my apartment lobby, they’d continue to get their mail, with only an occasional “Mm-hmm. . . . Mm-hmm.” I didn’t feel like popping one of my aphorisms after all this mumbling!

  In August, the whole Street Talking Movement was coming to a boil. I was one of the ones who felt that the talk going on inside restaurants (“Check, please”), office-building elevators (“Seventeenth floor, please”), as well as hotels and theatre lobbies, had lost its vitality. Outside, it was all new and experimental. I no longer wanted to talk to people. I wanted to talk at them.

  Although I felt that my Street Talking should be primarily an urban phenomenon, I did once yell at a combine on the edge of a wheat field in Saskatchewan.

  When I went back indoors in October, I was attacked by the critics. I felt I had exhausted the rant and rave, especially in STREET-CORNER CONVERSATION WITH PASSING CARS. I needed fresh forms. I was dying to work with the toast, the waffle, and the quibble. And in order to do so, it was imperative that I once again sit down at the dinner table.

  At this point, I would like to say something about critics. I have been accused by critics of “dominating the conversation,” of “not allowing anyone else to get a word in edgewise.” The most annoying thing about all this criticism is it makes me forget what it was I wanted to say. . . .

  This morning, I started putting my wit in code. A conversationalist can’t be too free with his/her best lines. Give a seemingly off-the-cuff recital of one and the next thing you know, it’s on every bumper sticker and T-shirt. That aphorism may have been as much as one month in the making, and meanwhile I haven’t gotten anything for my work.

  Then, at lunch, I discovered I possess that indefinable but unmistakable something known as Presence. This has had its effect on my style, as I no longer need to enter the conversation at all. In fact, talking doesn’t seem enough anymore. Now I plan to explore the other art forms—for example, having my picture taken.

  1986

  STEVE MARTIN

  WRITING IS EASY!

  WRITING is the most easy, pain-free, and happy way to pass the time of all the arts. As I write this, for example, I am sitting comfortably in my rose garden and typing on my new computer. Each rose represents a story, so I’m never at a loss for what to type. I just look deep into the heart of the rose, read its story, and then write it down. I could be typing kjfiu joew.mv jiw and enjoy it as much as typing words that actually make sense, because I simply relish the movements of my fingers on the keys. It is true that sometimes agony visits the head of a writer. At those moments, I stop writing and relax with a coffee at my favorite restaurant, knowing that words can be changed, rethought, fiddled with, and ultimately denied. Painters don’t have that luxury. If they go to a coffee shop, their paint dries into a hard mass.

  LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

  I would like to recommend that all writers live in California, because here, in between those moments when one is looking into the heart of a rose, one can look up at the calming blue sky. I feel sorry for writers—and there are some pretty famous ones—who live in places like South America and Czechoslovakia, where I imagine it gets pretty dank. These writers are easy to spot. Their books are often filled with disease and negativity. If you’re going to write about disease, I would say California is the place to do it. Dwarfism is never funny, but look at what happened when it was dealt with in California. Seven happy dwarfs. Can you imagine seven dwarfs in Czechoslovakia? You would get seven melancholic dwarfs at best—seven melancholic dwarfs and no handicap-parking spaces.

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA: WHY IT’S A BAD TITLE

  I admit that “Love in the time of . . .” is a great title, up to a point. You’re reading along, you’re happy, it’s about love. I like the way the word time comes in—a nice, nice feeling. Then the morbid Cholera appears. I was happy till then. Why not “Love in the Time of the Blue, Blue, Bluebirds”? “Love in the Time of Oozing Sores and Pustules” is probably an earlier title the author used as he was writing in a rat-infested tree house on an old Smith Corona. This writer, whoever he is, could have used a couple of weeks in Pacific Daylight Time.

  A LITTLE EXPERIMENT

  I took the following passage, which was no doubt written in some depressing place, and attempted to rewrite it under the sunny influence of California:

  Most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed.

  —Milan Kundera.

  Sitting in my garden, watching the bees glide from flower to flower, I let the above paragraph filter through my mind. The following New Paragraph emerged:

  I feel pretty,

  Oh so pretty,

  I feel pretty, and witty, and bright.

  Kundera was just too wordy. Sometimes the delete key is your best friend.

  WRITER’S BLOCK: A MYTH

  Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol. Sure, a writer can get stuck for a while, but when that happens to a real author—say, a Socrates or a Rodman—he goes out and gets an “as told to.” The alternative is to hire yourself out as an “as heard from,” thus taking all the credit. The other trick I use when I have a momentary stoppage is virtually foolproof, and I’m happy to pass it along. Go to an already published novel and find a sentence that you absolutely adore. Copy it down in your manuscript. Usually, that sentence will lead you to another sentence, and pretty soon your own ideas will start to flow. If they don’t, copy down the next sentence in the novel. You can safely use up to three sentences of someone else’s work—unless you’re friends, then two. The odds of being found out are very slim, and even if you are there’s usually no jail time.

  A DEMONSTRATION OF ACTUAL WRITING

  It’s easy to talk about writing, and even easier to do it. Watch:

  Call me Ishmael. It was cold, very cold here in the mountain town of Kilimanjaroville.® I could hear a bell. It was tolling.*2 I knew exactly for who it was tolling, too. It was tolling for me, Ishmael Twist.© [Author’s note: I am now stuck. I walk over to a rose and look into its heart.] That’s right, Ishmael Twist.©

  This is an example of what I call “pure” writing, which occurs when there is no possibility of its becoming a screenplay. Pure writing is the most rewarding of all, because it is constantly accompanied by a voice that repeats, “Why am I writing this?” Then, and only then, can the writer hope for his finest achievement: the voice of the reader uttering its complement, “Why am I reading this?”

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96

  STEVE MARTIN

  DRIVEL

  DOLLY defended me at a party. She was an artist who showed at the Whitney Biennial, so she had a certain outlook, a certain point of view, a certain understanding of things. She came into my life as a stranger who spoke up when I was being attacked by some cocktail types for being the publisher of The American Drivel Review. It wasn’t drivel that I published, she explained to them, but rather the idea of drivel.

  Later in the party, we paired off. She slouched back on the sofa with her legs ajar. I poured out my heart to this person I’d known barely ten minutes: I told her how it was hard to find good drivel, and even harder to write it. She understood that to succeed, one must pore over every word, replacing it five or six times, and labor over every pause and comma.

  I made love to her that night. The snap of the condom going on echoed through the apartment like Lawrence of Arabia’s spear landing in an Arab shield. I whispered passages from “Agamemnon’s Armor,” a five-inch-thick romance novel with three authors. She liked that.

  As the publisher of A.D.R., I had never actually written the stuff myself. But the next morning I sat down and tossed off a few lines, and then nervously showed them to Dolly. She took them into another room, and I sat alone for several painful minutes. She came back and looked at me. “This is not just drivel,” she exulted. “It’s pure drivel.”

  That night, we celebrated with a champagne dinner for two, and I told her that her skin was the color of fine white typing paper held in the sun and reflecting the pink of a New Mexican adobe horse barn.

  The next two months were heaven. I was no longer just publishing drivel; I was writing it. Dolly, too, had a burst of creativity—one that sent her into a splendid spiralling depression. She had painted a tabletop still-life—a conceptual work, in that it had no concept. Thus the viewer became a “viewer,” and looked at a painting, which became a “painting.” The “viewer” then left the museum to “discuss” the experience with “others.” Dolly had a way of taking an infinitesimal pause to imply the quotation marks around a word. (She could also indicate italics with a twist of her voice.)

  Not wanting to judge my own work, and not wanting to trust Dolly’s love-skewed opinion, I sent my pieces around and had them rejected by at least five magazines before I would publish them in the Drivel Review. I was disappointed when Woman’s Day accepted a short story I’d written about Gepetto’s Handmaiden, but, looking back, I guess I secretly knew that it was good. Dolly kept producing one art work after another and selling them to a rock musician with the unusual name of Fiber Behind; it kept us in doughnuts, and he really seemed to appreciate her work.

  But then our love was extinguished quickly, as though someone had thrown water from a high tower onto a burning dog.

  Dolly came home at her usual time. What I had to tell her was difficult to say, but it came out with the right amount of effortlessness, in spite of my nerves: “I went downtown and saw your new picture at Dia. I enjoyed it.”

  She acknowledged the compliment, started to leave the room, and, as I expected, stopped short.

  “You mean you ‘enjoyed’ it, don’t you?” Her voice indicated the quotation marks.

  I reiterated, “No, I actually enjoyed it.”

  Dolly’s attention focused, and she came over and sat beside me. “Rod, do you mean you didn’t go into the ‘gallery’ and ‘see’ my ‘painting’?”

  I nodded sadly.

  “You mean you saw my painting without any irony whatsoever?”

  Again, I nodded yes.

  “But, Rod, if you view my work without irony, it’s terrible.”

  I responded: “All I can tell you is that I enjoyed it.”

  We struggled through the night, trying to pretend that everything was the same, but by morning it was over between us, and Dolly left with a small “goodbye” soaked in the irony I had come to love so much.

  I wanted to run,

  run after her into the night,

  even though it was day.

  For my pain was bursting out of me,

  like a sock filled

  with one too many bocce balls.

  Those were my final words in the last issue of the Drivel Review. I heard that Dolly had spent some time with Fiber Behind, but I also knew that she had probably picked up a farewell copy and read my final, short, painful burst of drivel. I like to think that a tear marked her cheek, like a snail that has crept across white china.

  1997

  ANDY BOROWITZ

  EMILY DICKINSON, JERK OF AMHERST

  IT was with great reluctance that I decided to write about my thirty-year friendship with Emily Dickinson. To many who would read my book, Miss Dickinson was a cherished literary icon, and any attempt to describe her in human terms would, understandably, be resented. And yet by not writing this book I would be depriving her most ardent admirers of meeting the Emily Dickinson I was privileged to know: more than a mentor, she was my anchor, my compass, my lighthouse.

  Except when she was drunk. At those times, usually beginning at the stroke of noon, she became a gluttonous, vituperative harpy who would cut you for your last Buffalo wing. Once she got hold of her favorite beverage, Olde English malt liquor, the “belle of Amherst” would, as she liked to put it, “get polluted ’til [she] booted.” This Emily Dickinson would think nothing of spitting chewing tobacco in a protégé’s face, blithely explaining that she was “working on [her] aim.”

  Who, then, was the real Emily Dickinson? Daughter of New England in chaste service to her poetry, or back-stabbing gorgon who doctored your bowling score when you went to get more nachos? By exploring this question, I decided, I had a chance not only to learn about Miss Dickinson but also to learn about myself, and to learn even more about myself if the book went into paperback.

  When I first met Miss Dickinson, I was a literary greenhorn with a handful of unfinished poems, struggling to find my voice and something that rhymed with “Nantucket.” Believing that she would be more likely to take me under her wing if I appeared to be an ingénue, I entered her lace-curtained parlor in Amherst dressed as a Cub Scout. But she took no note of my attire as she read over that day’s work: “Parting is all we know of heaven,/And all we need of hell.” Putting down her quill, she brushed the bonnet-crowned curls from her forehead. “Well, it beats stealing cars!” she croaked in a husky baritone.

  Declaring that “quittin’ time is spittin’ time,” she reached into her sewing box for a pouch of her favorite “chaw,” as she called it, and pulled a “tall and foamy” out of the icebox. She generously agreed to look over my poems, pork rinds spilling from her mouth as she read. Finally, she anointed my efforts with words of encouragement that would sustain me throughout my early career: “You’re a poet and you don’t know it. Your feet show it. They’re long fellows. Now I gotta hit the head.”

  Years passed before I saw another, less merry, aspect of Miss Dickinson’s character, at a book party for Ralph Waldo Emerson. Miss Dickinson was experiencing a trough in her career; she had been reduced to writing advertising copy, most notably, “Nothing is better for thee/Than me,” for Quaker Oats. At the party, Miss Dickinson sat alone at the bar, doing tequila shooters and riffing moribund, angry couplets that often did not scan. I sensed that it was time to take her home.

  In the parking lot, she stopped abruptly near Emerson’s car. “Let’s key it,” she said, her eyes dancing maniacally. I assumed that this was just “Emily being Emily,” and tried to laugh it off. “Don’t be such a wuss,” she said, scratching “Waldo sucks” into the passenger door. I gently upbraided Miss Dickinson for her actions, which only served to inflame her: “Emerson’s trying to steal my juice, baby. It took me years to get where I am, understand what I’m saying? I used to run three-card monte on the streets of Newton. And I ain’t goin’ back!” At this moment, I found myself confronted with a possibility that I had never wanted to consider in all our years of friendship: Emily Dickinson was a real jerk.
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  Some years later, Boston University asked me to moderate a panel including Miss Dickinson, William Dean Howells, and the author, long since forgotten, of the verse “Finders, keepers/Losers, weepers.” I was by this time a successful poet in my own right, having become renowned for my series of “Happiness Is . . .” gift books and pillows. Seated next to Miss Dickinson, I attempted to mend the breach that had developed in our relationship; I went on at some length about my debt to her work. She took a sip of water, cleared her throat, and replied, “Bite me, you self-aggrandizing weasel.”

  The last time I saw Emily Dickinson, she said she didn’t have time to speak, as she was on her way to the greyhound races in Taunton. But I could not let her go without asking what had happened to our friendship. Her eyes downcast, she said, simply, “You’ve got ketchup on your tie.” Quizzically, I lowered my head and took a right uppercut to the jaw. As I crumpled to the pavement, Miss Dickinson unleashed a profane tirade, along with a pistol-whipping that was startling for both its vigor and its efficiency.