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

by Finder, Henry

  *1AUTHOR’S NOTE: Bergie was in this same class.

  *2This sentence written by Steve Martin as heard from Cindy Adams.

  *3Schwanzleben, in his work “Humor After Death,” hits on this point indirectly when he says, “All laughter is a muscular rigidity spasmodically relieved by involuntary twitching. It can be induced by the application of electricity as well as by a so-called ‘joke.’ ”

  *4A man who lived in a boarding house brought a horse home with him one night, led it upstairs, and shut it in the bathroom. The landlady, aroused by the commotion, protested, pointed to the broken balustrade, the torn stair carpet, and the obvious maladjustment of the whole thing, and asked the man, confidentially, just why he had seen fit to shut a horse in the common bathroom. To which the man replied, “In the morning, the boarders, one by one, will go into the bathroom, and will come rushing out, exclaiming, ‘There’s a horse in the bathroom!’ I want to be able to say, ‘Yes, I know.’ ”

  *5Gunfy, in his “Laughter Considered as a Joint Disease,” holds that the letter “W” is not essential to the beginning of a joke; so long as it comes in somewhere before the joke is over. However, tests made on five hundred subjects in the Harvard School of Applied Laughter, using the Mergenthaler Laugh Detector, have shown that, unless a joke begins with the letter “W,” the laughter is forced, almost unpleasant at times.

  *6A. E. Bassinette, in his pamphlet “What Is Humor—A Joke?,” claims to have discovered a small tropical fly which causes laughter. This fly, according to this authority, was carried from Central America back to Spain by Columbus’s men, and spread from there to the rest of Europe, returning to America, on a visit, in 1667, on a man named George Altschuh.

  *7Your car keys are in your right hand. Please remember to turn page right side up.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  WOODY ALLEN (b. 1935) was nominated for an Emmy as a writer for Sid Caesar’s television show before becoming famous as a standup comic. He is now best known as the writer and director (and often star) of dozens of movies, including such classics as Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters. He has contributed to The New Yorker since 1966.

  MARTIN AMIS (b. 1949) won the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, The Rachel Papers. His novels include Money, London Fields, and Time’s Arrow. His memoir, Experience, was published in 2000.

  ROGER ANGELL (b. 1920) has been a fiction editor at The New Yorker since 1956 and a contributor since 1944. He has been writing about baseball since 1962; his books include The Summer Game, Season Ticket, and A Pitcher’s Story: Innings with David Cone.

  MICHAEL J. ARLEN (b. 1930) was the magazine’s television critic in the 1960s and 1970s. He is the author of a novel and seven books of nonfiction, including Living-Room War, an examination of television reportage. In 1976, he won the National Book Award for Passage to Ararat.

  W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973) was born in York, England, was educated at Oxford, and achieved fame as a poet in the 1930s. In 1939 he immigrated to the United States, and published his first poem in The New Yorker. He was a frequent book reviewer in the 1950s and 1960s. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for The Age of Anxiety and the National Book Award in 1956 for The Shield of Achilles.

  DONALD BARTHELME (1931–1989) published 128 stories in The New Yorker over twenty-six years, as well as film reviews, Notes and Comment, and parodies appearing under the pseudonym William White. He grew up in Houston and worked there first as a reporter for the Houston Post, then as the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum. He moved to Manhattan in 1963. He was regarded as one of the most innovative writers of his generation. His collection Sixty Stories was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist in 1982.

  NOAH BAUMBACH (b. 1969) wrote and directed the films Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy.

  LUDWIG BEMELMANS (1898–1962) was born in the South Tirol, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He worked in hotels and restaurants from the age of fourteen, first in Europe and then in New York, and at one time part-owned a restaurant called the Hapsburg House. His writings for The New Yorker, mostly humorous memoirs, began appearing in 1937, and he also produced many covers for the magazine. His books include novels, travelogues, and memoirs, and he worked briefly as a screenwriter. His art was exhibited in New York and Paris; his murals can still be seen in New York’s Carlyle Hotel. He is now best remembered for the “Madeline” children’s books, the first of which was published in 1939.

  ROBERT BENCHLEY (1889–1945) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was the editor of the Lampoon while at Harvard, and went on to work at Life and Vanity Fair. One of the wits of the Algonquin Round Table, in the early 1920s, he developed his famous “Treasurer’s Report” monologue for a stage review; he performed it throughout his life onstage, and also in one of the first short films with sound, in 1928. He wrote for The New Yorker from 1925 to 1940, providing theater reviews, the Wayward Press column, and many humor pieces. He was also a popular radio broadcaster, and appeared in forty-eight short films, including the Oscar-winning How to Sleep (1935).

  ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979) grew up wealthy but parentless in Nova Scotia and Worcester, Massachusetts. After graduating from Vassar, she traveled, living first in Key West, then in Mexico. Her first poem in The New Yorker appeared in 1940. For most of the 1950s and 1960s, she lived with her partner, Maria Carlota Costellat de Macedo Soares, near Rio de Janeiro. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976.

  ROY BLOUNT, JR. (b. 1941) grew up in Georgia. In addition to several books of comic essays, he is the author of a novel and a book about the Pittsburgh Steelers. He has been an editor at Sports Illustrated and a screenwriter, read his stories and poems on public radio, and designed word puzzles for the now defunct Spy magazine.

  ANDY BOROWITZ (b. 1958) is the creator and producer of the television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and a co-producer of the film Pleasantville. His books include Rationalizations to Live By and The Trillionaire Next Door. He is a commentator on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition.

  MARSHALL BRICKMAN (b. 1941) was a member of the folksinging groups the Journeymen and the Tarriers before becoming a writer for Candid Camera and The Tonight Show. He collaborated with Woody Allen as a writer on several films, sharing the Oscar for Annie Hall, and went on to write and direct a number of feature films, including Simon and The Manhattan Project.

  DAVID BROOKS (b. 1961) is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

  CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY (b. 1952) is the editor of Forbes FYI. He is the author of eight books, including Thank You for Smoking, Wry Martinis, and Little Green Men.

  FRANK CAMMUSO (b. 1965), a political cartoonist, and HART SEELY (b. 1952), a reporter, are writing partners whose comic articles have appeared in The New York Times and the Syracuse Herald-Journal; 2007-Eleven and Other American Comedies is a collection of their pieces.

  CLARENCE DAY (1874–1935) was born into an affluent New York family and began a career as a stockbroker. He turned to writing after being partially disabled by rheumatoid arthritis, eventually working entirely from his bedroom. Great success came in the early 1930s, with comic memoirs of family life. These pieces ran in The New Yorker beginning in 1933, and were collected in 1935 as Life with Father. Life with Father became a long-running play in 1939, a film in 1947, and a CBS sitcom from 1953 to 1955.

  PETER DE VRIES (1910–1993) was born in Chicago and worked there as an editor of Poetry magazine. He was a regular contributor to The New Yorker in the 1940s and 1950s. His life in suburban Connecticut provided the setting for many of his popular comic novels, including Reuben, Reuben and The Tunnel of Love.

  LARRY DOYLE (b. 1958) was for several years a writer and producer for The Simpsons. He has also been an editor at Spy magazine and The National Lampoon.

  H. F. ELLIS (1907–2000) wrote and edit
ed for Punch, until S. J. Perelman encouraged him to contribute to The New Yorker. He is perhaps best known in England for his book about a hapless British schoolmaster, The Papers of A. J. Wentworth, BA.

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896–1940) achieved overnight fame with his first novel, This Side of Paradise. His output in the 1920s—notably The Beautiful and Damned and The Great Gatsby—epitomized the Jazz Age, a phrase Fitzgerald coined. From 1929 to 1937, he published three stories and two poems in The New Yorker.

  NANCY FRANKLIN (b. 1956) has been on the staff of The New Yorker since 1978. She is now a theater and television critic for the magazine.

  BILL FRANZEN (b. 1952) lives in Connecticut with his wife, the cartoonist Roz Chast. He is the author of the book Hearing from Wayne and Other Stories, and has contributed to The New Yorker since 1981.

  IAN FRAZIER (b. 1951) has written humor and reported pieces for The New Yorker since 1974. His books include Dating Your Mom, Great Plains, and On the Rez.

  BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN (b. 1930) published his first novel, Stern, in 1962; it was followed by A Mother's Kisses, The Current Climate, and collected short stories. His dramatic works include a play, Steambath, and screenplays for Splash! and Stir Crazy. Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos is a collection of his comic essays.

  POLLY FROST (b. 1952) has written on film for Harper’s Bazaar and Elle, and about cooking for The New York Times.

  FRANK GANNON (b. 1952) lives in Georgia. He is the author of Yo, Poe; Vanna Karenina; and All About Man, a comic book about the men’s movement. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker since 1985.

  VERONICA GENG (1941–1997) was born in Atlanta and worked as a fiction editor at The New Yorker starting in the mid-1970s. Many of her parodies were collected in Partners and Love Trouble Is My Business. A posthumous collection, Love Trouble: New and Collected Work, appeared in 1999.

  MICHAEL GERBER (b. 1969) and JONATHAN SCHWARZ (b. 1969) have written humor pieces together for many publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and McSweeney’s.

  WOLCOTT GIBBS (1902–1958) was born in New York and worked on newspapers in Long Island before joining The New Yorker in 1927. He became known for the varied Profiles, parodies, and reminiscences he contributed and for his exacting editing of others. In 1940, he became the magazine’s drama critic, and in 1950 his play Season in the Sun (adapted from his earlier book about Fire Island bohemianism) became a Broadway hit.

  ADAM GOPNIK (b. 1956) was born in Philadelphia and began to write for The New Yorker in 1986, where he has published under various rubrics, among them The Art World, Paris Journal, and New York Journal. He is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards for his essays and a George Polk Award for magazine reporting. He is the author of Paris to the Moon.

  ROBERT GRAVES (1895–1985) was born in London and produced more than 120 books in his long life, including the First World War memoir Goodbye to All That, the historical novel I, Claudius, and The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. His poems appeared in The New Yorker for a quarter of a century, starting in 1950.

  SCOTT GUTTERMAN (b. 1961) has contributed humor pieces to The New Yorker and GQ. He has also written for Artforum, Vogue, and other publications. He is the co-author, with Miles Davis, of The Art of Miles Davis.

  DONALD HALL (b. 1928) published his first poem at the age of sixteen. He has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry and numerous children’s books, as well as books on Henry Moore and baseball. He edited The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America (1990), The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes (1981), and more than twenty other anthologies and textbooks.

  PHILIP HAMBURGER (b. 1914) has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1939, contributing Profiles, foreign correspondence, Notes for a Gazetteer, television and music criticism, and numerous short, funny pieces. He has published eight collections of his work, including Friends Talking in the Night and Matters of State.

  JACK HANDEY (b. 1949) was born in Texas and lives in New York. He wrote for Steve Martin in the 1970s and 1980s, was a writer for Saturday Night Live, and is the author of several books, including Deep Thoughts; Deeper Thoughts; Deepest Thoughts; and The Lost Deep Thoughts.

  L. RUST HILLS (b. 1924) was for many years the fiction editor at Esquire. He has written three volumes of humor, the so-called Fussy Man Trilogy.

  GEORGE S. KAUFMAN (1889–1961) was the most successful American playwright of the 1920s and 1930s. He was the drama critic of The New York Times from 1917 to 1930 and was a member of the Algonquin Round Table set. His first theatrical success was Dulcy (1921), and in the following decades, almost always writing in collaboration with others, he turned out hit after hit, including Of Thee I Sing, with the Gershwins and Morrie Ryskind; Dinner at Eight, with Edna Ferber; and The Man Who Came to Dinner, with Moss Hart. He also wrote The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, and A Night at the Opera for the Marx Brothers.

  GARRISON KEILLOR (b. 1942) was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and has affectionately parodied Minnesota life with his tales of Lake Wobegon on his long-running public radio program, A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame at the Museum of Broadcast Communications, in Chicago, in 1994. He first published in The New Yorker in 1970, and his pieces have been collected in such books as Happy to Be Here, We Are Still Married, and The Book of Guys.

  ANTHONY LANE (b. 1962) reviewed books for The Independent, and films for The Independent on Sunday, in London before coming to The New Yorker in 1993. In addition to his biweekly film reviews, he contributes book reviews and other works of criticism, for which he has received a National Magazine Award.

  JOHN LARDNER (1912–1960) was one of Ring Lardner’s four sons, and, like his father, a sportswriter. He left Harvard to work on the New York Herald Tribune, wrote for Newsweek for twenty years, and wrote a television and radio column for The New Yorker. He was also known as a formidable poker player.

  DON MARQUIS (1878–1937) was born in Walnut, Illinois, and worked as a teacher, a sewing-machine salesman, a printer, and a railroad man before finding his way into newspapers. In 1916, he first introduced, in his column in the New York Sun, archy and mehitabel—a philosophical cockroach and a down-on-her-luck cat, portrayed in free verse ostensibly written by archy. Marquis also wrote novels, plays, poetry, and satire. The poem in this anthology was his only work for The New Yorker.

  STEVE MARTIN (b. 1945) is a comedian, actor, film director, and writer. He has written, and starred in, such films as The Jerk, L.A. Story, and Bowfinger. His humor pieces have appeared in the magazine since 1996. He is the author of Pure Drivel and Shopgirl: A Novella.

  GROUCHO MARX (1890–1977), the lead man of the Marx Brothers troupe, was born Julius Henry Marx in New York City. After a long apprenticeship in vaudeville, the brothers achieved Broadway success in the 1920s before starting to make films in 1929. Among them are classics like Animal Crackers, A Day at the Races, and Duck Soup. Groucho’s comic sketches in The New Yorker appeared from 1925 to 1929. In the 1950s he hosted the popular TV quiz show You Bet Your Life.

  BRUCE MCCALL (b. 1935) was born in Canada and came to the United States at the age of twenty-seven. He says that he has been writing and drawing interchangeably since the age of about seven. His first writing appeared in The New Yorker in 1980 and his first art three years later. In 1982, he published Zany Afternoons, a collection of humor pieces. His memoir, Thin Ice, published in 1997, was made into a film.

  PHYLLIS MCGINLEY (1905–1978) was born in Oregon and came to New Rochelle to work as a schoolteacher. Her poetry first appeared in Franklin P. Adams’s column, “The Conning Tower,” and, in 1930, in The New Yorker. The first of her eighteen books, On the Contrary, was published in 1934. Her poems were much loved for their simple evocation of ordinary life and Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades became, in 1961, the first collection of “light verse” to win a Pulitzer Prize.

  CHARLES MCGRATH (b. 1947) was, for more than twenty years, an editor at The New
Yorker. He has been the editor of The New York Times Book Review since 1995.

  THOMAS MEEHAN (b. 1932) was working in the Talk of the Town department when a friend introduced him to Ina Claire and Uta Hagen (“Ina, Uta”), inspiring his first (and widely imitated) Casual. Later, he wrote the book for the musical Annie, which won a Tony Award. Meehan has collaborated with Mel Brooks on the films To Be or Not to Be and Spaceballs, and on the stage version of The Producers, for which he also won a Tony.

  DANIEL MENAKER (b. 1941) was a fiction editor at The New Yorker and is now senior literary editor at Random House. He is the author of a novel, The Treatment, and two collections of short stories, Friends and Relations and The Old Left.

  LOUIS MENAND (b. 1952) is a professor of English at the City University of New York and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has contributed reviews, essays, and other pieces since 1991. His books include Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context and The Metaphysical Club.

  HOWARD MOSS (1922–1987) became the poetry editor of The New Yorker in 1950 and held the post until his death. He contributed more than a hundred of his own poems to the magazine, and published twelve collections, four books of criticism, and two plays.

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899–1977) was born in St. Petersburg and left Russia after the Revolution. In the interwar years, he published poems and novels in Russian under the pseudonym V. Sirin. In 1940, he came to the United States, where he taught literature at various universities and began to publish in English and under his own name. His first poem appeared in The New Yorker in 1942, and his first short story three years later. In 1959, after the popular success of Lolita, he moved to Switzerland, where he wrote the novels Pale Fire, Ada, and Transparent Things.

  OGDEN NASH (1902–1971) was born in Rye, New York, and worked selling bonds and writing advertising copy before his first poem was published in The New Yorker, in 1930. His poems appeared in the magazine for the rest of his life, and their wit and uniquely anarchic prosody won him a huge following. They were collected in some twenty volumes. With Kurt Weill and S. J. Perelman, he collaborated on the hit musical One Touch of Venus (later a film with Ava Gardner), which included the classic song “Speak Low.”