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

by Finder, Henry

  78. 100 Worst Movies of the Eighties

  79. Bonding with the Feminine

  80. Bringing Out the Feminine

  81. Loving Your Anima

  82. Show Tunes You Can Whistle, by Keith

  83. Life Begins at Forty, Too Bad You’re Fifty, by Trini Montana

  84. It’s Time to Leave Childish Humor Behind, by Ayed Lykta Dooya

  85. Ulysses (first sentence only)

  86. Vanity Fair, September issue

  87. Your Prostate, by Dr. Pokey d’Hole

  88. Glasses or Eye Surgery? (pamphlet)

  89. Tingling Feet: A Diet Cure

  90. Ringing in the Ears (pamphlet)

  91. Hearing in Restaurants, by Dr. S. Louder

  92. Those Itchy, Itchy Eyes (E-mail)

  93. Arthritis! (Internet download)

  94. Arrhythmia Can Be Fun (billboard)

  95. The User’s Guide to Prescription Drugs

  96. Why It’s Important to Get a Fancy Table at a Restaurant, by D. Jones

  97. Final Exit, Hemlock Society

  98. Those Fabulous Sixties!, by Guru Bob

  99. Staying Current Through Insane Contract Demands

  100. Celebrity Secrets for Crying During Interviews (audio book)

  1998

  JACK HANDEY

  REINTRODUCING ME TO MY HABITAT

  I WOULD like to take this opportunity to urge conservation-minded people everywhere to pressure the government for the reintroduction of me to my native habitat.

  My native habitat, of course, is the desert Southwest, where I used to roam wild and free. But, sadly, I no longer exist there. For several years, I have been largely confined to a small two-bedroom apartment in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.

  It is clear that I do not belong here, as my neighbors will tell you. I am still frightened by car horns, and the fancy Eastern food I am fed is at odds with my natural diet of enchiladas and gingersnaps. Often I can be found pacing mindlessly back and forth in my cramped office, which I am told is a sign that I am insane.

  Occasionally, there are scattered sightings of me in my old habitat—shooting a wet straw wrapper at someone’s kid in a restaurant in Santa Fe, then denying it; doing my funny cowboy dance at a party in Silver City until people make me stop—but these cannot be confirmed.

  For all intents and purposes, I have been eliminated from my former range, the Rio Grande Valley. I used to be found from El Paso and Juárez in the south all the way up to Taos and sometimes beyond (if I missed the turnoff to Taos).

  Once, I filled a vital role in the ecosystem. I would prey primarily on the weak and the old, who were usually the only ones who would hire me. Then, when their businesses went under, they were removed from the system, as nature intended.

  My world was in harmony. But then, as often happens, man intervened. Ranchers would drive me from their lands when they caught me throwing a keg-party barbecue, maybe using one of their cows. Divorce and job dismissals took their toll. I found I could not coexist with my creditors. At one point, public sentiment against me was so strong that I was considered “vermin” and a “pest.”

  But now, I think, attitudes are changing. People don’t automatically want to shoot me, like they used to. This is mainly because of my reeducation efforts and because they haven’t seen me for a long time.

  The truth about me is finally starting to emerge. For instance, there is no record of me ever attacking a human, unless he was much, much smaller than me. The old myths are starting to die off, such as the one that if you leave your campsite unattended, I will sneak in and steal beer and food from your cooler and maybe knock down your tent.

  The time to act is now. I am not getting any younger, and my rent here in New York could go up at any time. Also I could be wiped out by the stock market.

  I have been conducting a captive-breeding program with my wife, but so far it has yielded no offspring. (The reason, I found out, is that my wife uses contraceptives, which I guess I knew.)

  All of these factors make it imperative that you write the government and tell them to reintroduce me, via first-class airfare, to my old habitat. With a generous per diem and a late-model car, I think I could once again fill my old niche. I would probably try to mate with females of my species, unless my wife found out. And I would be willing to keep a journal of what I eat and what TV shows I watch, so that more may be learned about my ways.

  I will, if necessary, wear a radio collar.

  I am willing to do these things because I believe that until people can sit around a desert campfire and go “Shhh, hear that?” and then listen for the plaintive howl of me, we as a society have lost something.

  1999

  JACK HANDEY

  THANK YOU FOR STOPPING

  THANK you for stopping. You have obviously found me unconscious by the side of the road, or at a party, or possibly propped up against a wall someplace, and you have wisely reached into my pocket and found this medical advisory.

  If you found other things in my pockets, kindly do not read or keep them. They are none of your business and/or do not belong to you. And remember that, even though I am unconscious now, when I wake up I will remember the things I had.

  If I am wearing a tie, please loosen it. But, again, do not take it off and keep it. It is not yours and is probably more expensive than you can afford. If I am not wearing a tie, look around at the other people who have gathered to look at me and see if any of them is wearing a tie that might belong to me. If so, please approach that individual and ask for my tie back. If he says it is his, say you do not think so. If he insists, give him one of the cards (in the same pocket where you found this note) of my attorney, and tell the person he will be hearing from him soon.

  Keep me warm. Take off your coat and put it around me. Do not worry, you will get it back. If you do not, within thirty days contact the attorney on the card, and he will advise you.

  If you must, build a fire to keep me warm. But—and this is very important—DO NOT ROAST ME OVER THE FIRE. I say this because many people who stop to help others are not that smart, and are capable of doing such a thing.

  There are some pills in one of my pockets. Take them and hold on to them. If any authorities ask you about them, say they are yours.

  If I am outdoors under a hot sun, do not allow children near me with a magnifying glass. Even if they are on leashes, do not allow monkeys near me. Do not allow others to make fun of me, poke me with sticks, or, if an anthill is nearby, pour honey on me. Do not allow onlookers to pose with me for “funny” photos. Failure to stop any of these things may be construed as participation in them, and may subject you to severe legal remedies.

  Try to keep me calm. If you are not a physically attractive person, try not to let yourself be the first thing I see when I wake up.

  Call an ambulance. I guess that would be obvious to most people, but you never know.

  If I am on fire, put me out. If you put me out by rolling me on the ground, do not let me roll down a hill. If I do roll down a hill and get stuck under some bushes, just leave me there; you’ve given me enough “help” already.

  If I suddenly begin to sweat profusely and my entire body begins to shimmy violently, do not worry; that is normal.

  If I am bleeding, how’d that happen? What did you do now?

  Even though I am unconscious, do not dangle things over me. I do not like that.

  Answer my cell phone if it rings. If it is a woman named Peggy, pretend to be me and say you are breaking up with her.

  If I have wet my pants, get a glass of water and act like you tripped and spilled it on my pants.

  If I appear near death, do not call a priest. And do not call a rabbi and a minister, and have them all go into a bar and do something funny, because I don’t want my life to end up as one big joke.

  Get a better job. If you have time to stop for unconscious people, you are obviously not working at full capacity.

  Thank you again for stopping. Now,
please, stand back and give me some air.

  1999

  CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

  HOMEWORK: A PARENT’S GUIDE

  MID-YEAR Parent-Teacher Conferences: Explain to child’s teachers that you and your spouse declined all social invitations during the previous semester, including a state dinner at the White House, owing to amount of child’s homework. Effect may be enhanced by blubbering, twitching, fidgeting with metal balls, etc. Suppress impulse to perform act of aggravated violence on fellow-parent who counters that his child is insufficiently “challenged” by current homework load. (Note: Recent juries have demonstrated marked reluctance to convict in such cases.)

  • The Appeal: In event teacher does not appear to care that you are staying up until eleven-thirty every night to help child with report on Gross Domestic Product of Guatemala, you may discuss your “issues” (previously called “rage”) with the school principal. This will result in an expression of sympathy, and an increase in the workload to 12:30 A.M. In extremis, drop hint to school principal that you are contemplating “significant” gesture to principal’s “discretionary fund” (code for principal’s summer “cottage”), but that you lack the proper time in the evening to “judiciously” oversee liquidation of the relevant equities, bonds, real-estate properties, etc.

  • Math: Parents will find that the current “new” math bears no resemblance to the one of their own day, or, indeed, to any math. Ptolemy and Euclid would not recognize it. The multiplication table, for instance, has been replaced by a system whereby the digits of the right hand are interlaced with the toes of the left while the child hops backward in three-two time. (Chicago Math.) Variants include the Milwaukee Math, in which whole numbers (that is, numbers not followed by dots and more numbers) are expressed by binary burping, and the San Francisco Math, which employs Grape-Nuts and an algorithm based on the number of people currently leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge each month. These advances have rendered the normally capable parent incapable of calculating how many apples Jerome will be left with if he gives half to Mary, eats two and deposits the remaining number in an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. Fathers today find it increasingly useful to advise, “Go ask Mom; she really knows this stuff.” (Note: You will be expected to be conversant with the metric system. Useful tips: One metre is “a squidge” more than the traditional yard. A hundred millimetres equals an extra-length cigarette, while a “litre” bottle of expensive French fizzy water is “more or less” one quart.)

  • The Phone Call: Each night just as dinner is on the table, child will announce that he must telephone Georgia or Joseph to get the assignment for tomorrow, despite your tantrums of the previous four evenings over the absolute necessity of writing down the assignment in class. As a rule, Georgia or Joseph’s phone will be busy for not less than one and a quarter hours, prompting rancorous parental running commentary. (Warning: Late-night calls to the teacher to find out the assignment are generally considered unwise, as the parent is by now in a state of acute emotional derangement and is therefore apt to “download” on the subject of homework. This will result in an increase in the daily load to 1:30 A.M.)

  • The Knapsack: The current fashion is for child to carry a knapsack weighing no less than 3.2 times body weight (gross tonnage). This includes such items as are deemed essential by today’s students, such as a hundredweight of Pokémon cards, hair scrunchies mixed with jelly beans, spare limbs from Barbie dolls, rotting fruit matter from the previous term, and extra ammunition clips. Net tonnage is the amount—expressed in long tons—of materials directly related to education, such as books, binders, and a minimum of three dozen mechanical pencils not containing leads. Care should be exercised while assisting child with harnessing of knapsack so as to avoid slipped disks and rotator-cuff injuries necessitating surgery. Nightly commencement of homework process (see tab A: “Getting To ‘Okay, Okay’ ”) will involve ten minutes of rummaging in knapsack for “the” pen, despite parental proffer of any number of alternative pens. Length of time necessary to locate pen generally corresponds to time remaining in current episode of “Dawson’s Creek.”

  • The Science Project: No phrase strikes more terror into the heart of a parent today than “Science Project.” Notwithstanding, a few weeks into the start of term your spouse will cheerfully announce to you—in child’s presence, so as to preclude any protest on your part—the “wonderful” news that your child has selected you, specifically, to be his “partner” in the aforementioned exercise. (Refrain from stabbing spouse with fork under the table; there will be plenty of time in which to express your rage, betrayal, and other emotions.) You are now expected to devote all your “free” time over the next six weeks to devising a miniature version of the particle accelerator at CERN, in Switzerland, a home video explaining string theory using cooked spaghetti, or erecting a model of the human genome using 3.4 trillion Styrofoam balls (available at Wal-Mart). Unfortunately, the days are past when science projects could without embarrassment consist of store-bought ant farms (minus ants); hastily drawn cardboard charts showing how fast ice melts when immersed in a mixture of five parts gin, one part vermouth; a model of Sputnik using a Ping-Pong ball and two toothpicks; or a malodorous dish of dead tadpoles proving scientifically once and for all that amphibians cannot be left indefinitely on a hot radiator. In extremis, a project can be built around parent’s recent hospitalization for exhaustion.

  2000

  DAVID OWEN

  WHAT HAPPENED TO MY MONEY?

  GOD has taken your money to live with Him in Heaven. Heaven is a special, wonderful place, where wars and diseases and stock markets do not exist, only happiness. You have probably seen some wonderful places in your life—perhaps during a vacation, or on television, or in a movie—but Heaven is a million billion times more wonderful than even Disney World. Jesus and Mary and the angels live in Heaven, and so do your grandparents and your old pets and Abraham Lincoln. Your money will be safe and happy in Heaven forever and ever, and God will always take care of it.

  Your money is still your money—it will always be your money—but it cannot come back to you, not ever. That may seem unfair to you. One day you were buying puts and shorting straddles, and the next day you woke up to find that your account had been closed forever. Perhaps you got a sick or empty feeling in your stomach when that happened; perhaps you have that sick or empty feeling still. You loved your money very, very much, and you did not want God to take it away.

  Your feelings are natural and normal—they are a part of the way God made you—but God took your money in accordance with His wonderful plan, which is not for us to know or understand. You must trust God and have faith that He loves your money just as He loves you and every other part of His creation. Someday—probably a very, very long time from now, after you have lived a long and happy life in compliance with the nation’s securities laws—God will take you to live with Him in Heaven, too. Then you will understand.

  Even though your money is gone forever, it can still be a part of your life. As long as love and kindness and happiness dwell in your heart, your money can dwell there, too. At night, before you go to sleep, you can talk to your money in a prayer. You can think about the B.M.W. that you and your money were going to buy, and you can remember the house on the beach that you and your money were going to build, and you can laugh about your funny old plan to send your children to private colleges. Someday, when you no longer feel as sad as you do today, you may even find that thinking about your money can give you some of the same happy feelings that spending your money used to give you.

  Those feelings belong to you and they always will; no one can take them away from you. Even when you are very, very old, you will still be able to think about your money and remember how much you loved it. But you will still not be able to spend your money, or even borrow against it.

  2000

  RECOLLECTIONS

  AND

  REFLECTIONS

  ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
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  ON TAXI DRIVERS

  I AM engaged at present on a monumental work which will give the history of the New York taxicab up to and including 1930. It will take up many problems, such as why the most rheumatic cabs invariably throng the curbs outside the best hotels, and will examine the morbid passion of the drivers for weaving in and out of elevated pillars. Then it will assemble all the best recipes for dissuading the tumultuous creatures from driving at a pace faster than the shattered fare can endure. I may add that these recipes will be compiled by a nervous wreck, who feels that nothing is so certain as death and taxis.

  Above all, it will inquire into the reasons for the flashing individualism which, in an age of robots, makes the taxi driver as vivid and striking as a scarlet tanager in a thicket of spruces. Long ago I wrote an essay entitled “The Paris Taxi Driver Considered as an Artist.” Therein I told, among other anecdotes, the story of the sneering cab which cruised the rain-swept streets one night when most of the Paris taxis were on strike. Its malicious driver would swoop up to the curb, ask a frantically signalling citizen where he wanted to go, and then drive laughingly on without him. But when one young couple, huddled pathetically under an umbrella, told him that they had hoped to go to the opera, he suddenly forgot all about the class war, and even forgot to bargain for the extra fare everybody was offering.

  “Mon dieu,” he cried, “jump in. It is ‘Samson and Delilah’ tonight, and the overture begins at eight.”

  And whirled them across Paris on one wheel. That essay was written in my salad days, and is marred by the provincial notion that a pomme de terre has a glamour not possessed by our own potato, or more particularly that all quaint characters are to be found abroad. Now, in what must be my cheese-and-crackers days, I know that the seeing eye would find just such anecdotes on every corner in New York. Your correspondant has at least a listening ear for any who may have such tales to tell.