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

by Finder, Henry

  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

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