Says Christmas wrappings are a waste of trees.
Dad’s staring, vaguely puzzled, at his gift.
And Uncle Jack, to give us all a lift,
Now tells a Polish joke he heard at work.
So Ned calls Jack a bigot and a jerk.
Aunt Jane, who knows that’s true, breaks down and cries.
Then Mom comes out to help, and burns the pies.
Of course, Jack hates the tie. He’ll take it back.
That’s fair, because I hate my Uncle Jack.
CHORUS:
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Tibet,
Or any place where folks cannot remember
That there is something special in December.
Tibet’s about as far as you can get.
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Tibet.
VERSE:
Mom’s turkey is a patriotic riddle:
It’s red and white, plus bluish in the middle.
The blue’s because the oven heat’s not stable.
The red’s from ketchup Dad snuck to the table.
Dad says he loves the eyeglass stand from me—
Unless a sock rack’s what it’s meant to be.
“A free-range turkey’s best,” Ned says. “It’s pure.”
“This hippie stuff,” Jack says, “I can’t endure.”
They say goodbye, thank God. It’s been a strain.
At least Jack’s tie has got a ketchup stain.
CHORUS:
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Rangoon,
Or any place where Christmas is as noisy
As Buddhist holidays might be in Boise.
I long to hear Der Bingle smoothly croon,
“I’m dreaming of a Christmas in Rangoon”—
Or someplace you won’t hear the Christmas story,
And reindeer’s something eaten cacciatore.
I know things can’t go on the way they are.
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Qatar.
1994
JOHN UPDIKE
DUET, WITH MUFFLED BRAKE DRUMS
50 Years Ago Rolls met Royce—a Meeting that made Engineering History
—ADV. IN THE NEW YORKER.
Where grey walks slope through shadows shaped like lace
Down to dimpleproof ponds, a precious place
Where birds of porcelain sing as with one voice
Two gold and velvet notes—there Rolls met Royce.
“Hallo,” said Rolls. His umber silhouette
Seemed mounted on a blotter brushed when wet
To indicate a park. Beyond, a brown
Line hinted at the profile of The Town.
And Royce, his teeth and creases straight, his eye
A perfect match for that well-lacquered sky
(Has zenith since, or iris, been so pure?),
Said, “Pleased to meet you, I am sure.”
A graceful pause, then Rolls, the taller, spake:
“Ah—is there anything you’d care to make?
A day of it? A fourth at bridge? Some tea?”
Royce murmured, “If your afternoon is free,
I’d rather, much, make engineering history.”
1954
OCULAR HYPERTENSION
“Your optic nerve is small and slightly cupped,”
my drawling ophthalmologist observed,
having for minutes submitted that nerve,
or, rather, both those nerves to baths of light—
to flashing, wheeling scrutiny in which
my retinas’ red veins would, mirrored, loom
and fade. “And it appears, as yet, undamaged.
But your pressure reads too high. Glaucoma
will be the eventual result if you
go untreated. What you have now we call
‘ocular hypertension.’ ” Wow! I liked
the swanky sound, the hint of jazz, the rainbow
edginess: malaise of high-class orbs,
screwed to taut bliss by what raw sight absorbs.
2000
Mother’s out of jail, Dad!
Let us ask her in!
Make her Christmas merry,
With food and fire and gin!
Mother’s out of jail, Dad,
Let us ask her in!
She’s watching through the window
Her babes in happy play;
Do not call a copper
To club the Jane away—
Remember, ere you strike her,
That once her hair was gray!
Soon at some new night-club
She’ll be pinched again,
For Mother is so popular
With all the dancing men—
Invite her in to visit,
Mother’s home again!
She’s staring through the window
At the Yuletide glow!
Oh, do not throw the old wife
Back into the snow!
She bore you all your children,
And oft has told you so.
Mother’s in the street, Dad!
She is out of jail!
Put morphine in the needles,
And some ether in the ale,
Mother’s home for Christmas,
Mother’s out of jail!
1928
PHYLLIS MCGINLEY
MELANCHOLY REFLECTIONS AFTER A LOST ARGUMENT
I always pay the verbal score
With wit, concise, selective.
I have an apt and ample store
Of ladylike invective.
My mots, retorts, and quips of speech,
Hilarious or solemn,
Placed end to end, no doubt, would reach
To any gossip column.
But what avails the epigram,
The clever and the clear shot,
Invented chiefly when I am
The only one in earshot?
And where’s the good of repartee
To quell a hostile laughter,
That tardily occurs to me
A half an hour after?
God rest you merry, gentlemen,
Who nastily have caught
The art of always striking when
The irony is hot.
1933
THE SEVEN AGES OF A NEWSPAPER SUBSCRIBER
From infancy, from childhood’s earliest caper,
He loved the daily paper.
Propped on his grubby elbows, lying prone,
He took, at first, the Comics for his own.
Then, as he altered stature and his voice,
Sports were his single choice.
For a brief time, at twenty, Thought became
A desultory flame,
So with a critic eye he would peruse
The better Book Reviews.
Behold the bridegroom, then—the dazzled suitor
Turned grim commuter,
Learning without direction
To fold his paper to the Housing Section.
Forty enlarged his waistline with his wage.
The Business Page
Engrossed his mind. He liked to ponder well
The charted rise of Steel or Tel & Tel.
Choleric, pompous, and too often vext,
The fifties claimed him next.
The Editorials, then, were what he scanned.
(Even, at times, he took his pen in hand.)
But witness how the human viewpoint varies:
Of late he reads the day’s Obituaries.
1946
INCIDENT IN THE AFTERNOON
I heard two ladies at a play—
A comedy considered witty.
It was a Wednesday matinée
And they had come from Garden City.
Their frocks were rather arts-and-crafts,
And they had lunched, I learned, at Schrafft’s.
Although we did not speak or bow
Or comment even on the weather,
More intimate I know them now
/> Than if we’d gone to school together.
(As you must presently divine,
Their seats were rather near to mine.)
Before the curtain rose I heard
What each had told her spouse that morning.
I learned the history, word for word,
Of why three cooks had given warning.
Also that neither cared a straw
For domineering sons-in-law.
I heard a bridge hand, play by play.
I heard how all’s not gold that glitters.
I heard a moral résumé
Of half a dozen baby-sitters.
I learned beyond the slightest question
Shrimps are a trial to digestion.
The lights went down. The stage was set.
Still, in the dusk that fans the senses,
Those ladies I had never met
Poured out their swollen confidences.
The dialogue was smart. It stirred them
To conversation. And I heard them.
Above each stylish epigram
Wherewith the hero mocked his rival,
They proved how nicely curried lamb
Might justify a roast’s revival,
That some best-selling author’s recent
Book was lively. But indecent.
I heard a list of maladies
Their all too solid flesh was heir to.
I heard that one, in her deep freeze,
Could store a steer, but did not care to.
A neighbor’s delicate condition
I heard of, all through intermission.
They laid their lives, like open tomes,
Upon my lap and turned the pages.
I heard their taste in hats and homes,
Their politics, but not their ages.
So much I heard of strange and true
Almost it reconciled me to
One fact, unseemly to recall:
I did not hear the play at all.
1949
OGDEN NASH
PROCRASTINATION IS ALL OF THE TIME
Torpor and sloth, torpor and sloth,
These are the cooks that unseason the broth.
Slothor and torp, slothor and torp
The directest of beeline ambitions can warp.
He who is slothic, he who is torporal
Will not be promoted to sergeant or corporal.
No torporer drowsy, no comatose slother
Will make a good banker, or even an author.
Torpor I deprecate, sloth I deplore;
Torpor is tedious, sloth is a bore.
Sloth is a bore and torpor is tedious,
Fifty parts comatose, fifty tragedious.
How drear, on a planet with plenty of woes,
That sloth is not slumber or torpor repose;
That the innocent joy of not getting things done
Simmers sulkily down to plain not having fun.
You smile in the morn like a bride in her bridalness
At the thought of a day of nothing but idleness.
By midday you’re slipping, by evening a lunatic,
A perusing-the-newspapers-all-afternoonatic,
Worn to a wraith from the half-hourly jaunt
After glasses of water you didn’t want,
And at last when onto your pallet you creep,
You discover yourself too tired to sleep.
O torpor and sloth, torpor and sloth,
These are the cooks that unseason the broth.
Torpor is harrowing, sloth it is irksome—
Everyone ready? Let’s go out and worksome.
1939
TO MY VALENTINE
More than a catbird hates a cat,
Or a criminal hates a clue,
Or the Axis hates the United States,
That’s how much I love you.
I love you more than a duck can swim,
And more than a grapefruit squirts;
I love you more than Ickes is a bore,
And more than a toothache hurts.
As a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea,
Or a juggler hates a shove,
As a hostess detests unexpected guests,
That’s how much you I love.
I love you more than a wasp can sting,
And more than the subway jerks;
0;I love you as much as a beggar needs a crutch,
And more than a hangnail irks.
I swear to you by the stars above,
And below, if such there be,
As the High Court loathes perjurious oaths,
That’s how you’re loved by me.
1941
SO THAT’S WHO I REMIND ME OF
When I consider men of golden talents,
I’m delighted, in my introverted way,
To discover, as I’m drawing up the balance,
How much we have in common, I and they.
Like Burns, I have a weakness for the bottle;
Like Shakespeare, little Latin and less Greek;
I bite my fingernails like Aristotle;
Like Thackeray, I have a snobbish streak.
I’m afflicted with the vanity of Byron;
I’ve inherited the spitefulness of Pope;
Like Petrarch, I’m a sucker for a siren;
Like Milton, I’ve a tendency to mope.
My spelling is suggestive of a Chaucer;
Like Johnson, well, I do not wish to die
(I also drink my coffee from the saucer);
And if Goldsmith was a parrot, so am I.
Like Villon, I have debits by the carload;
Like Swinburne, I’m afraid I need a nurse;
By my dicing is Christopher out-Marlowed,
And I dream as much as Coleridge, only worse.
In comparison with men of golden talents,
I am all a man of talent ought to be;
I resemble every genius in his vice, however henious. . . .
Yet I write so much like me.
1942
COMPLIMENTS OF A FRIEND
How many gifted pens have penned
That Mother is a boy’s best friend!
How many more, with like afflatus,
Award the dog that honored status!
I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers
If I belittle dogs or mothers,
But, gracious, how can I agree?
I know my own best friend is me.
We share our joys and our aversions,
We’re thicker than the Medes and Persians,
We blend like voices in a chorus,
The same things please, the same things bore us.
If I am broke, then me needs money,
I make a joke, me finds it funny.
I think of beer, me shares the craving,
If I have whiskers, me needs shaving.
I know what I like, me knows what art is,
We hate the people at cocktail parties.
When I can stand the crowd no more,
Why, me is halfway to the door.
We two reactionary codgers
Prefer the Giants to the Dodgers.
I am a dodo, me an auk.
We grieve that pictures learned to talk.
For every sin that I produce,
Kind me can find some soft excuse,
And when I blow a final gasket,
Who but me will share my casket?
Beside us, Pythias and Damon
Were just two unacquainted laymen.
Sneer not, for if you answer true,
Don’t you feel that way about you?
1948
THE INVITATION SAYS FROM FIVE TO SEVEN
There’s nothing like an endless party,
A collection of clammy little groups,
Where a couple of the guests are arty
And the rest of the guests are goops.
There’s the confidential girlish chatter—
It soothes you like a drug—
And the gentle pitter-patter
As the anchovies hit the rug.
There’s the drip, drip, drip of the mayonnaise
As the customers’ lips slip on the canapés,
There are feuds that are born,
There are friendships that pine away,
And the big cigar that smolders on the Steinaway.
The major trouble with a party
Is you need a guest to give it for,
And the best part of any guest
Is the last part out the door.
There’s nothing like an endless party,
And there hasn’t been since ancient Rome.
Here’s Silenus making passes at Astarte
While Mrs. Silenus begs him to go home.
There is bigamy about the boudoirs,
There is bundling at the bar,
And the sideboard where the food was
Has the aspect of an abattoir.
You wonder why they pursue each other’s wives,
Who by now resemble the cream cheese and the chives.
0;There’s a corpse on the floor
From New Rochelle or Scarborough,
And its mate is swinging from the candelabara.
The best location for a party
Is in a room without a floor,
And the best way to give a party
Is leave town the night before.
Endnotes
To return to the corresponding text, click on the asterisk and reference number.
Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker Page 55