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

by Finder, Henry

  THE ASTOUNDING STRING

  ILLUSION:

  A piece of string, which for some reason has been run through two cylindrical pieces of wood, and for some other reason has two small glass beads attached to either end, is cut with a knife so that it hangs in two distinct pieces. This in itself is startling enough. But when the two cylinders are placed together and subjected to the influence of the wand, with the result that the string is again pulled back and forth between them as freely as it ever was, the effect is electric.

  EXPLANATION:

  Never quite clear, even to the magician. Somehow the string is either joined together, or another piece of string run through the cylinders, or something. Owing to this haziness concerning the basic principles of the trick, it was not always performed with complete success, and very often not even tried. What is worth doing at all is worth doing well.

  MIND-READING

  ILLUSION:

  (This is a feat based on a similar, though more elaborate, one performed in India.)

  A member of the audience leaves the room and the rest decide on some object which he is to be “willed” to touch when he returns. Let us say that it is a hassock. The absentee is then sent for and the “control” (the magician himself) fixes his gaze on him and says: “Will you hassock ice cream?” Immediately, the “subject” walks across the room and touches a plate of ice cream. Pandemonium ensues.

  EXPLANATION:

  The one who leaves the room is in reality a confederate of the magician, who has been practicing the act since three o’clock in the afternoon. It has been agreed that, whatever the object to be touched is, the “control” will introduce its name into a sentence apparently spoken at random. Thus, if the object selected has been a radiator, the sentence would be “Have you had any radiators today?” (Catch on?) Where the instance quoted above was faulty was that two possibilities were mentioned in the same sentence. Eternal vigilance is the only guard against this sort of slip-up.

  THUS we see that, no matter how mystifying a feat of legerdemain or mind-reading may be, there is always an explanation for it somewhere in the archives of Black Art. But, human nature being what it is, people would much rather be fooled in this manner than deal, day in and day out, with the obvious and transparent things of life.

  Once again I apologize to the Society of Magicians for “spilling the beans.”

  1933

  ROBERT BENCHLEY

  WHY WE LAUGH—OR DO WE?

  (LET’S GET THIS THING SETTLED, MR. EASTMAN)

  IN order to laugh at something, it is necessary (1) to know what you are laughing at, (2) to know why you are laughing, (3) to ask some people why they think you are laughing, (4) to jot down a few notes, (5) to laugh. Even then, the thing may not be cleared up for days.

  All laughter is merely a compensatory reflex to take the place of sneezing. What we really want to do is sneeze, but as that is not always possible, we laugh instead. Sometimes we underestimate our powers and laugh and sneeze at the same time. This raises hell all around.

  The old phrase “That is nothing to sneeze at” proves my point. What is obviously meant is “That is nothing to laugh at.” The wonder is that nobody ever thought of this explanation of laughter before, with the evidence staring him in the face like that.*3

  We sneeze because we are thwarted, discouraged, or devil-may-care. Failing a sneeze, we laugh, faute de mieux. Analyze any funny story or comic situation at which we “laugh” and it will be seen that this theory is correct. Incidentally, by the time you have the “humor” analyzed, it will be found that the necessity for laughing has been relieved.

  Let us take the well-known joke about the man who put the horse in the bathroom.*4 Here we have a perfect example of the thought-sneeze process, or, if you will, the sneeze-thought process. The man, obviously an introvert, was motivated by a will-to-dominate-the-bathroom, combined with a desire to be superior to the other boarders. The humor of the situation may seem to us to lie in the tag line “I want to be able to say, ‘Yes, I know,’ ” but we laugh at the joke subconsciously long before this line comes in. In fact, what we are really laughing (or sneezing) at is the idea of someone’s telling us a joke that we have heard before.

  Let us suppose that the story was reversed, and that a horse had put a man into the bathroom. Then our laughter would have been induced by the idea of a landlady’s asking a horse a question and the horse’s answering—an entirely different form of joke.

  The man would then have been left in the bathroom with nothing to do with the story. Likewise, if the man had put the landlady into the bathroom, the horse would obviously have been hors de combat (still another form of joke, playing on the similarity in sound between the word “horse” and the French word “hors,” meaning “out of.” Give up?).

  Any joke, besides making us want to sneeze, must have five cardinal points, and we must check up on these first before giving in:

  (1) The joke must be in a language we can understand.

  (2) It must be spoken loudly enough for us to hear it, or printed clearly enough for us to read it.

  (3) It must be about something. You can’t just say, “Here’s a good joke” and let it go at that. (You can, but don’t wait for the laugh.)

  (4) It must deal with either frustration or accomplishment, inferiority or superiority, sense or nonsense, pleasantness or unpleasantness, or, at any rate, with some emotion that can be analyzed, otherwise how do we know when to laugh?

  (5) It must begin with the letter “W.”*5

  Now, let us see just how our joke about the horse in the bathroom fulfills these specifications. Using the Gestalt, or Rotary-Frictional, method of taking the skin off a joke, we can best illustrate by making a diagram of it. We have seen that every joke must be in a language that we can understand and spoken (or written) so clearly that we can hear it (or see it). Otherwise we have this:

  Joke which we cannot hear, see, or understand the words of.

  You will see in Figure 2 that we go upstairs with the man and the horse as far as the bathroom. Here we become conscious that it is not a true story, something we may have suspected all along but didn’t want to say anything about. This sudden revelation of absurdity (from the Latin ab and surdus, meaning “out of deafness”) is represented in the diagram by an old-fashioned whirl.

  The horse-in-bathroom story under ideal conditions.

  Following the shock of realization that the story is not real, we progress in the diagram to the point where the landlady protests. Here we come to an actual fact, or factual act. Any landlady in her right mind would protest against a horse’s being shut in her bathroom. So we have, in the diagram, a return to normal ratiocination, or Crowther’s Disease, represented by the wavy line. (Whoo-hoo!)

  From then on, it is anybody’s joke. The whole thing becomes just ludicrous. This we can show in the diagram by the egg-and-dart design, making it clear that something has definitely gone askew. Personally, I think that what the man meant to say was “That’s no horse—that’s my wife,” but that he was inhibited. (Some of these jokes even I can’t seem to get through my head.)*6

  1937

  S. J. PERELMAN

  INSERT FLAP “A” AND THROW AWAY

  ONE stifling summer afternoon last August, in the attic of a tiny stone house in Pennsylvania, I made a most interesting discovery: the shortest, cheapest method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected. In this technique (eventually adopted by the psychology department of Duke University, which will adopt anything), the subject is placed in a sharply sloping attic heated to 340°F, and given a mothproof closet known as the Jiffy-Cloz to assemble. The Jiffy-Cloz, procurable at any department store or neighborhood insane asylum, consists of half a dozen gigantic sheets of red cardboard, two plywood doors, a clothes rack, and a packet of staples. With these is included a set of instructions mimeographed in pale-violet ink, fruity with phrases like “Pass Section F through Slot AA, taking care not to fold tabs behind washers (see F
ig. 9).” The cardboard is so processed that as the subject struggles convulsively to force the staple through, it suddenly buckles, plunging the staple deep into his thumb. He thereupon springs up with a dolorous cry and smites his knob (Section K) on the rafters (RR). As a final demonic touch, the Jiffy-Cloz people cunningly omit four of the staples necessary to finish the job, so that after indescribable purgatory, the best the subject can possibly achieve is a sleazy, capricious structure which would reduce any self-respecting moth to helpless laughter. The cumulative frustration, the tropical heat, and the soft, ghostly chuckling of the moths are calculated to unseat the strongest reason.

  In a period of rapid technological change, however, it was inevitable that a method as cumbersome as the Jiffy-Cloz would be superseded. It was superseded at exactly nine-thirty Christmas morning by a device called the Self-Running 10-Inch Scale-Model Delivery-Truck Kit Powered by Magic Motor, costing twenty-nine cents. About nine on that particular morning, I was spread-eagled on my bed, indulging in my favorite sport of mouth-breathing, when a cork fired from a child’s air gun mysteriously lodged in my throat. The pellet proved awkward for a while, but I finally ejected it by flailing the little marksman (and his sister, for good measure) until their welkins rang, and sauntered in to breakfast. Before I could choke down a healing fruit juice, my consort, a tall, regal creature indistinguishable from Cornelia, the Mother of the Gracchi, except that her foot was entangled in a roller skate, swept in. She extended a large, unmistakable box covered with diagrams.

  “Now don’t start making excuses,” she whined. “It’s just a simple cardboard toy. The directions are on the back—”

  “Look, dear,” I interrupted, rising hurriedly and pulling on my overcoat, “it clean slipped my mind. I’m supposed to take a lesson in crosshatching at Zim’s School of Cartooning today.”

  “On Christmas?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Yes, it’s the only time they could fit me in,” I countered glibly. “This is the big week for crosshatching, you know, between Christmas and New Year’s.”

  “Do you think you ought to go in your pajamas?” she asked.

  “Oh, that’s O.K.” I smiled. “We often work in our pajamas up at Zim’s. Well, goodbye now. If I’m not home by Thursday, you’ll find a cold snack in the safe-deposit box.” My subterfuge, unluckily, went for naught, and in a jiffy I was sprawled on the nursery floor, surrounded by two lambkins and ninety-eight segments of the Self-Running 10-Inch Scale-Model Delivery-Truck Construction Kit.

  THE theory of the kit was simplicity itself, easily intelligible to Kettering of General Motors, Professor Millikan, or any first-rate physicist. Taking as my starting point the only sentence I could comprehend, “Fold down on all lines marked ‘fold down;’ fold up on all lines marked ‘fold up,’ ” I set the children to work and myself folded up with an album of views of Jane Russell. In a few moments, my skin was suffused with a delightful tingling sensation and I was ready for the second phase, lightly referred to in the directions as “Preparing the Spring Motor Unit.” As nearly as I could determine after twenty minutes of mumbling, the Magic Motor (“No Electricity—No Batteries—Nothing to Wind—Motor Never Wears Out”) was an accordion-pleated affair operating by torsion, attached to the axles. “It is necessary,” said the text, “to cut a slight notch in each of the axles with a knife (see Fig. C). To find the exact place to cut this notch, lay one of the axles over diagram at bottom of page.”

  “Well, now we’re getting someplace!” I boomed, with a false gusto that deceived nobody. “Here, Buster, run in and get Daddy a knife.”

  “I dowanna,” quavered the boy, backing away. “You always cut yourself at this stage.” I gave the wee fellow an indulgent pat on the head that flattened it slightly, to teach him civility, and commandeered a long, serrated bread knife from the kitchen. “Now watch me closely, children,” I ordered. “We place the axle on the diagram as in Fig. C, applying a strong downward pressure on the knife handle at all times.” The axle must have been a factory second, because an instant later I was in the bathroom grinding my teeth in agony and attempting to staunch the flow of blood. Ultimately, I succeeded in contriving a rough bandage and slipped back into the nursery without awaking the children’s suspicions. An agreeable surprise awaited me. Guided by a mechanical bent clearly inherited from their sire, the rascals had put together the chassis of the delivery truck.

  “Very good indeed,” I complimented (naturally, one has to exaggerate praise to develop a child’s self-confidence). “Let’s see—what’s the next step? Ah, yes. ‘Lock into box shape by inserting tabs C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, and L into slots C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, and L. Ends of front axle should be pushed through holes A and B.’ ” While marshalling the indicated parts in their proper order, I emphasized to my rapt listeners the necessity of patience and perseverance. “Haste makes waste, you know,” I reminded them. “Rome wasn’t built in a day. Remember, your daddy isn’t always going to be here to show you.”

  “Where are you going to be?” they demanded.

  “In the movies, if I can arrange it,” I snarled. Poising tabs C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, and L in one hand and the corresponding slots in the other, I essayed a union of the two, but in vain. The moment I made one set fast and tackled another, tab and slot would part company, thumbing their noses at me. Although the children were too immature to understand, I saw in a flash where the trouble lay. Some idiotic employee at the factory had punched out the wrong design, probably out of sheer spite. So that was his game, eh? I set my lips in a grim line and, throwing one hundred and fifty-seven pounds of fighting fat into the effort, pounded the component parts into a homogeneous mass.

  “There,” I said with a gasp, “that’s close enough. Now then, who wants candy? One, two, three—everybody off to the candy store!”

  “We wanna finish the delivery truck!” they wailed. “Mummy, he won’t let us finish the delivery truck!”

  “Delivery truck, delivery truck!” I bawled, turning purple. “What do you think life is, one long delivery truck?” Threats, cajolery, bribes were of no avail. In their jungle code, a twenty-nine-cent gewgaw bulked larger than a parent’s love. Realizing that I was dealing with a pair of monomaniacs, I determined to show them who was master and wildly began locking the cardboard units helter-skelter, without any regard for the directions. When sections refused to fit, I gouged them with my nails and forced them together, cackling shrilly. The side panels collapsed; with a bestial oath, I drove a safety pin through them and lashed them to the roof. I used paper clips, bobby pins, anything I could lay my hands on. My fingers fairly flew and my breath whistled in my throat. “You want a delivery truck, do you?” I panted. “All right, I’ll show you!” As merciful blackness closed in, I was on my hands and knees, bunting the infernal thing along with my nose and whinnying, “Roll, confound you, roll!”

  “ABSOLUTE quiet,” a carefully modulated voice was saying, “and fifteen of the white tablets every four hours.” I opened my eyes carefully in the darkened room. Dimly I picked out a knifelike character actor in a Vandyke beard and pencil-striped pants folding a stethoscope into his bag. “Yes,” he added thoughtfully, “if we play our cards right, this ought to be a long, expensive recovery.” From far away, I could hear my wife’s voice bravely trying to control her anxiety.

  “What if he becomes restless, Doctor?”

  “Get him a detective story,” returned the leech. “Or better still, a nice, soothing picture puzzle—something he can do with his hands.”

  1944

  L. RUST HILLS

  HOW TO EAT AN ICE-CREAM CONE

  BEFORE you even get the cone, you have to do a lot of planning about it. We’ll assume that you lost the argument in the car and that the family has decided to break the automobile journey and stop at an ice-cream stand for cones. Get things straight with them right from the start. Tell them that after they have their cones there will be an imaginary circle six feet away from the car and that no one—man,
woman, or especially child—will be allowed to cross the line and reënter the car until his ice-cream cone has been entirely consumed and he has cleaned himself up. Emphasize: Automobiles and ice-cream cones don’t mix. Explain: Melted ice cream, children, is a fluid that is eternally sticky. One drop of it on a car-door handle spreads to the seat covers, to trousers, to hands, and thence to the steering wheel, the gearshift, the rearview mirror, all the knobs of the dashboard—spreads everywhere and lasts forever, spreads from a nice old car like this, which might have to be abandoned because of stickiness, right into a nasty new car, in secret ways that even scientists don’t understand. If necessary, even make a joke: “The family that eats ice-cream cones together sticks together.” Then let their mother explain the joke and tell them you don’t mean half of what you say, and no, we won’t be getting a new car.

  Blessed are the children who always eat the same flavor of ice cream or always know beforehand what kind they will want. Such good children should be quarantined from those who want to “wait and see what flavors there are.” It’s a sad thing to observe a beautiful young child who has always been perfectly happy with a plain vanilla ice-cream cone being subverted by a young schoolmate who has been invited along for the weekend—a pleasant and polite visitor, perhaps, but spoiled by permissive parents and scarred by an overactive imagination. This schoolmate has a flair for contingency planning: “Well, I’ll have banana if they have banana, but if they don’t have banana then I’ll have peach, if it’s fresh peach, and if they don’t have banana or fresh peach I’ll see what else they have that’s like that, like maybe fresh strawberry or something, and if they don’t have that or anything like that that’s good I’ll just have chocolate marshmallow chip or chocolate ripple or something like that.” Then—turning to one’s own once simple and innocent child, now already corrupt and thinking fast—the schoolmate invites a similar rigmarole. “What kind are you going to have?”