Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (2 page)

To My Valentine /
Ogden Nash

So That’s Who I Remind Me Of /
Ogden Nash

Compliments of a Friend /
Ogden Nash

The Invitation Says from Five to Seven /
Ogden Nash

Theme and Variation /
Peter De Vries

People /
W. H. Auden

Six Poets in Search of a Lawyer /
Donald Hall

The Naked and the Nude /
Robert Graves

12 O’Clock News /
Elizabeth Bishop

Christmas in Qatar /
Calvin Trillin

Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums /
John Updike

Ocular Hypertension /
John Updike

Endnotes

Notes on Contributors

About the Editors

Copyright

To John Updike

INTRODUCTION

F
OR
all that has been written about the origins of The New Yorker, the significance of one fact has been overlooked: its main backer owed his fortune to yeast. To be founded upon yeast is different from being founded upon soap, or steel, or natural gas, and, surely, the source of this seed money—spore money?—set the tone for all that followed. Our first editor, Harold Ross, wanted a publication that would be consistently leavened by comedy. It was his constant refrain: “We need words like the art”—prose that matched the spirit of the cartoons. “Humor was allowed to infect everything,” E. B. White, a singularly contagious soul, would write. And Ross’s efforts paid off: New Yorker humor, like Dole pineapples and Microsoft operating systems, represents a deep alliance of product and institution.

It was a serious business, putting out what Ross called his “comic weekly.” Lois Long, an early contributor, described daily staff meetings that consisted of craps games, and an editor whose wont was “to move the desks about prankishly in the dead of night.” (Some things never change.) To start naming the magazine’s contributors in its earliest years is to explain how Ross achieved his objectives. There was Dorothy Parker, who, as Constant Reader, concluded a review of Dreiser’s memoir
Dawn
with the couplet “Theodore Dreiser / Should ought to write nicer.” There was Robert Benchley, for a decade the magazine’s chief drama critic, who ascribed to John Barrymore’s Hamlet “the smile of an actor who hates actors, and who knows that he is going to kill two or three before the play is over.” There was Lois Long herself on fashion; Ring Lardner on radio; George Ryall (Audax Minor) on the racetrack; and Alexander Woollcott on whatever popped into his head. If humor infected everything, it was because it wasn’t quarantined to humor pieces, or “casuals,” as they came to be known. An undercurrent of jokiness ran through the reviews and the commentary. (That tradition has lasted—from the unfailing urbanity of Brendan Gill and the unfailing anti-urbanity of Pauline Kael down to the spring-loaded wit of such writers as Nancy Franklin and Anthony Lane, who have kept the art of the comic review very much alive.) After the arrival, in the thirties, of Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, Ross got long-form journalism with matching brio and brilliance. The comic weekly had come of age.

Still, if there was such a thing as
New
Yorker
humor—as distinct from humor in
The
New
Yorker—
the credit must go largely to E. B. White and James Thurber. White, a master of understatement, could creep along so quietly you might not realize that he was stalking prey, and that you were it. Thurber was perhaps a more belligerent soul, but then his favorite quarry was himself. Both worked in every comic form and invented new ones; and their touch was so pervasive that, in the words of Brendan Gill, “the persona of the magazine [was] White-Thurber.” Yet White and Thurber had a particular genius for creating personas of their own. In 1927, Thurber published “An American Romance,” which opens, “The little man in an overcoat that fitted him badly at the shoulders had had a distressing scene with his wife. He had left home with a look of serious determination and had now been going around and around in the central revolving door of a prominent department store’s main entrance for fifteen minutes.” With this, “Little Man” humor, as it came to be called, was launched—tales of ineffectual men victimized by the world, by women, by nagging suspicions of their own absurdity.

Another comic specialty of the magazine was what Benchley dubbed “dementia praecox” humor: monologues, basically, of the unstrung and the unhinged—“The Tell-Tale Heart” with laughs. It was a mainstay of Benchley’s repertory, and so was the news-clipping conceit: the piece that started with some scrap of news and elaborated on the premise ad absurdum. In the thirties, the humorous reminiscence, too, became a staple of
The New Yorker.
It began, more or less, with a notable series of pieces by Clarence Day, a former stockbroker who, confined to his apartment by severe arthritis, set about writing affectionately satiric anecdotes about life with his father. Shortly after Day’s first piece appeared, in 1933, Thurber started publishing bits of autobiography about his Ohio upbringing, eventually collected under the title
My Life and Hard Times.
Thus primed, the pump soon yielded memoirs by Ludwig Bemelmans, H. L. Mencken, and Ruth McKenney. As an old bit of magazine wisdom has it, you get what you publish.

Sometimes—blessedly—you get even what you don’t publish. To editors, as custodians of standards, work that broke the rules could seem just broken. A recent chronicler of the magazine, Ben Yagoda, has extracted from the archives an exchange of memos among three of its most illustrious editors—Katharine S. White, Wolcott Gibbs, and John Mosher—in reaction to a 1933 submission called “The Island of Dr. Finkle,” apparently inspired by the recently released film version of
The Island of Dr. Moreau.
Here’s a sample.

W
HITE:
“Not having seen the Island of Dr. What’s His Name I don’t know whether this is any good. He seems to be burlesquing a dozen things at once also??”

G
IBBS:
“I didn’t know there was any such book. Thought this was just a burlesque of those old clubmen talking about India stories. . . . Object to one or two of the worst gags, but other wise O.K. By the way, Donald Stewart and Thurber have both done things like this, if it matters.”

M
OSHER:
“Awful humor—this dry, synthetic stale style—central idea about island is rather funny perhaps. . . . I can’t stand these trick phrasings—jumpy nervous nasty things.”

In a letter of rejection to the author, Ross offered the following counsel: “I think you ought to decide when you write a piece whether it is going to be a parody, or a satire, or nonsense. These are not very successfully mixed in short stuff; that has been my experience.” Though the advice went unheeded, a few years later Ross hired Sidney Joseph Perelman anyway. In an introduction to a 1937 Perelman collection, Robert Benchley himself graciously declared that the Brooklyn-born interloper now owned the “dementia praecox field”: “Any further attempts to garble thought-processes sounded like imitation-Perelman.” Perhaps determined to keep such imitators at bay, Perelman went on to flood the market with the real thing, contributing three hundred casuals over the next four decades. In 1952—when about a hundred and thirty of them had so far seen print—W. H. Auden pronounced
The New Yorker
“the best comic magazine in existence.”

Persistence was one way past the praetorian guards, but there were other routes, too. Prospective contributors may wish to study the example of Peter De Vries. De Vries, who grew up in Chicago, came to
The New Yorker
’s attention from
Poetry
magazine via James Thurber; and he came to Thurber’s attention via a flattering essay he had published entitled “James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock.” It is just possible to imagine that his career trajectory would have been different had he published, instead, “Ed Sullivan: The Comic Prufrock.”

Students of the magazine have pointed out that the fifties saw the addition of relatively few new comic voices. There are various theories to account for this. Some conjecture that if only people like Stanley Elkin, Terry Southern, or Joseph Heller had published something along the lines of “James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock,” they, too, might have found their way into the magazine. Others blame the growing allure of Hollywood—the maw of Tinseltown. Yet, as was the case with Benchley, Perelman, and Parker, the traffic between the coasts goes both ways. Sensitive artists, moreover, have always found this world of glitz and glamour something of a hardship post, what with being ordered around by besuited philistines and having their words hacked at by an army of anonymous interlopers. Which is not to say that Hollywood is any better.

In the event, the lean years were followed by fat: in the sixties, new arrivals included Calvin Trillin, Pauline Kael, Donald Barthelme, and Woody Allen. They published journalism, criticism, fiction, and casuals, and they were funny, in ways slightly different from the way people used to be funny. In the seventies and eighties, some of the magazine’s most distinctive voices—including Garrison Keillor, Veronica Geng, George W. S. Trow, and Ian Frazier—devoted themselves to reinventing the casual. (To read Frazier’s “A Reading List for Young Writers” is to inoculate oneself against writing sonorously about literature.) And in the past decade a new generation of contributors—but why mention names you’ll find in the issues on your coffee table?—both extend and pay homage to a tradition arduously achieved, and do it in ways that can be stunningly original, or stunningly not. As the poet said, there’s tradition, and there’s the individual talent, and a collection like this one helps you appreciate how intertwined the two are—how eerily contemporary some of the old stuff seems, how venerable some of the new.

WHY did we choose what we chose? On the whole, the basis for our selections was visceral: Was a piece funny? Is it still? Did it make us gasp with admiration and an apprehension of the sublime? (This last was optional.) Yes, you’ll find the odd concession—sometimes
very
odd—to literary history. But basically pieces are here because they made us laugh. A very few are here because they’re weird, ethereal, and beautiful, and would have made us laugh if we were better people. Sophisticates may object that we have included pieces they consider overexposed, excessively familiar. Behind this objection, we submit, is a fetching misunderstanding of contemporary American culture. “Overexposed” may describe a Pepsi commercial with Britney Spears; it does not describe “The Night the Ghost Got In.”

What taxed our ingenuity wasn’t so much deciding what to put in as deciding what not to. “Humor was allowed to infect everything,” as White had observed, and, for an anthologist, that’s just the problem. A collection of humor writing from
The New Yorker
can’t be a collection of humorous writing from
The New Yorker—
a category that would include perhaps the greater part of the magazine’s output. To keep the book to a compassable length, we resorted to firm, if arbitrary rules. In the end, the essential principle of inclusion, for any given candidate, was simple: did we fail to come up with some excuse for excluding it?

Most “humor pieces”—casuals, or the sort of piece that in today’s
New Yorker
runs under the rubric Shouts & Murmurs—are short: canapés, not steaks. These are mostly what you’ll find here: pieces that have some specific density of wit or are governed by a comic premise. And yet some of the finest instances of humor are, one might say, incidental (though incidental in an integral way) to a work of journalism. These are nonfiction narratives where, in the words of Calvin Trillin, “the jokes sometimes are suspended for the lamentable necessity of transferring a little information to the reader.” Our decision to scant such pieces means that some of our funniest contributors aren’t represented. We’ve already beaten ourselves up over this, so don’t feel you have to. Likewise, we generally gave a cold shoulder to short stories. We did so out of the kind of anxiety that inspires trade quotas: if we opened our doors to their authors, we’d be inundated with scarily deserving contenders—from Sally Benson to George Saunders—and hardworking native humorists would be put out of work. Hence our recourse to such protectionist edicts as would put the Hawley-Smoot Act to shame. Having established these firm ground rules, naturally, we proceeded to violate them, dutifully proving the rule with its necessary exceptions.

Rules, anyway, get you only so far. Occasionally, we found that a comic tour de force required a slightly greater familiarity with Van Wyck Brooks or Frank Harris than could now be assumed; nor do we apologize for omitting a dead-on parody of James Branch Cabell. There were instances in which reclamation would have amounted to cruelty, in a whatever-happened-to-Baby-Jane sort of way. Some classics are best appreciated in the diffuse, amber light of distant recollection, and we honored them by not disturbing their repose. And, of course, a great deal of the most ingenious and uproarious work is, by design, topical; it belongs to a particular place and time. This is not said invidiously. The vaunted “test of time” is a circular one: all the test of time really tells you is whether something has survived the test of time. Unless strontium 90 is to be preferred to sunflowers, perishability is no disgrace. But these concerns applied only to a minority of cases. In truth, there were hundreds of pieces we’d love to have included, had we not
—vide
deforestation, the greenhouse gases—loved the planet more. “I must get back to the office and reject,” John Mosher used to say to his lunch companions. The poor fellow. We thought about him a lot.

“WHEN you are creeping through the literary underbrush hoping to bag a piece of humor with your net, nothing seems funny,” Russell Baker wrote in a preface to an anthology of American humor that he compiled. “The thing works the other way around. Humor is funny when it sneaks up on you and takes you by surprise.”

Yes, funny writing is funny that way. Defying the laws of nature, humor is often diluted by concentration. So you might be ill-advised to read this book straight through. Consider this, rather, a prescription of antibiotics, to be rationed out over a period of time, not knocked back all at once. Consider it a fridge full of food, and put yourself on a diet. Print is a perilous medium, so precautions must be taken. When stand-up comedians play to a club, there’s usually a two-drink minimum, which means they’re extracting laughs from a pleasantly sozzled audience. Are
you
pleasantly sozzled? We worry about these things. We worry about the sated reader who turns pages out of obligation, as stone-faced as an Easter Island
moai.

This collection is divided into categories that reflect a few salient preoccupations of the contributors. We’d like to pretend these categories represent a definitive taxonomy. In truth, given the amount of overlap, the exercise was more like assigning students to a homeroom. Still, one distinction did seem useful: we wanted to segregate pieces that are basically witty but truthful essays or recollections from those that are basically fictive conceits (as most of them are). You don’t want to have to get to the fourth paragraph to figure out that the voice is the author’s, not some apparently soigné narrator whose lofty tones will devolve into utter lunacy before the piece is over. Reflections and recollections, however various, have thus been placed in administrative custody for their own protection and yours. But beyond this? We laboriously organized the contents in a cunning, intricate sequence so that you could enjoy the transgressive thrill of reading them
out of order.