Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (37 page)

I feel pretty,

Oh so pretty,

I feel pretty, and witty, and bright.

Kundera was just too wordy. Sometimes the delete key is your best friend.

WRITER
’
S BLOCK: A MYTH

Writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol. Sure, a writer can get stuck for a while, but when that happens to a real author—say, a Socrates or a Rodman—he goes out and gets an “as told to.” The alternative is to hire yourself out as an “as heard from,” thus taking all the credit. The other trick I use when I have a momentary stoppage is virtually foolproof, and I’m happy to pass it along. Go to an already published novel and find a sentence that you absolutely adore. Copy it down in your manuscript. Usually, that sentence will lead you to another sentence, and pretty soon your own ideas will start to flow. If they don’t, copy down the next sentence in the novel. You can safely use up to three sentences of someone else’s work—unless you’re friends, then two. The odds of being found out are very slim, and even if you are there’s usually no jail time.

A DEMONSTRATION OF ACTUAL WRITING

It’s easy to talk about writing, and even easier to do it. Watch:

Call me Ishmael. It was cold, very cold here in the mountain town of Kilimanjaroville.® I could hear a bell. It was tolling.
^*2
I knew exactly for who it was tolling, too. It was tolling for me, Ishmael Twist.
^©
[Author’s note: I am now stuck. I walk over to a rose and look into its heart.] That’s right, Ishmael Twist.
^©

This is an example of what I call “pure” writing, which occurs when there is no possibility of its becoming a screenplay. Pure writing is the most rewarding of all, because it is constantly accompanied by a voice that repeats, “Why am I writing this?” Then, and only then, can the writer hope for his finest achievement: the voice of the reader uttering its complement, “Why am I reading this?”

1996

STEVE MARTIN

DRIVEL

D
OLLY
defended me at a party. She was an artist who showed at the Whitney Biennial, so she had a certain outlook, a certain point of view, a certain understanding of things. She came into my life as a stranger who spoke up when I was being attacked by some cocktail types for being the publisher of
The American Drivel Review.
It wasn’t drivel that I published, she explained to them, but rather the
idea
of drivel.

Later in the party, we paired off. She slouched back on the sofa with her legs ajar. I poured out my heart to this person I’d known barely ten minutes: I told her how it was hard to find good drivel, and even harder to write it. She understood that to succeed, one must pore over every word, replacing it five or six times, and labor over every pause and comma.

I made love to her that night. The snap of the condom going on echoed through the apartment like Lawrence of Arabia’s spear landing in an Arab shield. I whispered passages from “Agamemnon’s Armor,” a five-inch-thick romance novel with three authors. She liked that.

As the publisher of
A.D.R.,
I had never actually written the stuff myself. But the next morning I sat down and tossed off a few lines, and then nervously showed them to Dolly. She took them into another room, and I sat alone for several painful minutes. She came back and looked at me. “This is not just drivel,” she exulted. “It’s
pure
drivel.”

That night, we celebrated with a champagne dinner for two, and I told her that her skin was the color of fine white typing paper held in the sun and reflecting the pink of a New Mexican adobe horse barn.

The next two months were heaven. I was no longer just publishing drivel; I was writing it. Dolly, too, had a burst of creativity—one that sent her into a splendid spiralling depression. She had painted a tabletop still-life—a conceptual work, in that it had no concept. Thus the viewer became a “viewer,” and looked at a painting, which became a “painting.” The “viewer” then left the museum to “discuss” the experience with “others.” Dolly had a way of taking an infinitesimal pause to imply the quotation marks around a word. (She could also indicate italics with a twist of her voice.)

Not wanting to judge my own work, and not wanting to trust Dolly’s love-skewed opinion, I sent my pieces around and had them rejected by at least five magazines before I would publish them in the
Drivel Review.
I was disappointed when
Woman’s Day
accepted a short story I’d written about Gepetto’s Handmaiden, but, looking back, I guess I secretly knew that it was good. Dolly kept producing one art work after another and selling them to a rock musician with the unusual name of Fiber Behind; it kept us in doughnuts, and he really seemed to appreciate her work.

But then our love was extinguished quickly, as though someone had thrown water from a high tower onto a burning dog.

Dolly came home at her usual time. What I had to tell her was difficult to say, but it came out with the right amount of effortlessness, in spite of my nerves: “I went downtown and saw your new picture at Dia. I enjoyed it.”

She acknowledged the compliment, started to leave the room, and, as I expected, stopped short.

“You mean you ‘enjoyed’ it, don’t you?” Her voice indicated the quotation marks.

I reiterated, “No, I actually enjoyed it.”

Dolly’s attention focused, and she came over and sat beside me. “Rod, do you mean you didn’t go into the ‘gallery’ and ‘see’ my ‘painting’?”

I nodded sadly.

“You mean you saw my painting without any irony whatsoever?”

Again, I nodded yes.

“But, Rod, if you view my work without irony, it’s terrible.”

I responded: “All I can tell you is that I enjoyed it.”

We struggled through the night, trying to pretend that everything was the same, but by morning it was over between us, and Dolly left with a small “goodbye” soaked in the irony I had come to love so much.

I wanted to run,

run after her into the night,

even though it was day.

For my pain was bursting out of me,

like a sock filled

with one too many bocce balls.

Those were my final words in the last issue of the
Drivel Review.
I heard that Dolly had spent some time with Fiber Behind, but I also knew that she had probably picked up a farewell copy and read my final, short, painful burst of drivel. I like to think that a tear marked her cheek, like a snail that has crept across white china.

1997

ANDY BOROWITZ

EMILY DICKINSON, JERK OF AMHERST

I
T
was with great reluctance that I decided to write about my thirty-year friendship with Emily Dickinson. To many who would read my book, Miss Dickinson was a cherished literary icon, and any attempt to describe her in human terms would, understandably, be resented. And yet by not writing this book I would be depriving her most ardent admirers of meeting the Emily Dickinson I was privileged to know: more than a mentor, she was my anchor, my compass, my lighthouse.

Except when she was drunk. At those times, usually beginning at the stroke of noon, she became a gluttonous, vituperative harpy who would cut you for your last Buffalo wing. Once she got hold of her favorite beverage, Olde English malt liquor, the “belle of Amherst” would, as she liked to put it, “get polluted ’til [she] booted.” This Emily Dickinson would think nothing of spitting chewing tobacco in a protégé’s face, blithely explaining that she was “working on [her] aim.”

Who, then, was the real Emily Dickinson? Daughter of New England in chaste service to her poetry, or back-stabbing gorgon who doctored your bowling score when you went to get more nachos? By exploring this question, I decided, I had a chance not only to learn about Miss Dickinson but also to learn about myself, and to learn even more about myself if the book went into paperback.

When I first met Miss Dickinson, I was a literary greenhorn with a handful of unfinished poems, struggling to find my voice and something that rhymed with “Nantucket.” Believing that she would be more likely to take me under her wing if I appeared to be an ingénue, I entered her lace-curtained parlor in Amherst dressed as a Cub Scout. But she took no note of my attire as she read over that day’s work: “Parting is all we know of heaven,/And all we need of hell.” Putting down her quill, she brushed the bonnet-crowned curls from her forehead. “Well, it beats stealing cars!” she croaked in a husky baritone.

Declaring that “quittin’ time is spittin’ time,” she reached into her sewing box for a pouch of her favorite “chaw,” as she called it, and pulled a “tall and foamy” out of the icebox. She generously agreed to look over my poems, pork rinds spilling from her mouth as she read. Finally, she anointed my efforts with words of encouragement that would sustain me throughout my early career: “You’re a poet and you don’t know it. Your feet show it. They’re long fellows. Now I gotta hit the head.”

Years passed before I saw another, less merry, aspect of Miss Dickinson’s character, at a book party for Ralph Waldo Emerson. Miss Dickinson was experiencing a trough in her career; she had been reduced to writing advertising copy, most notably, “Nothing is better for thee/Than me,” for Quaker Oats. At the party, Miss Dickinson sat alone at the bar, doing tequila shooters and riffing moribund, angry couplets that often did not scan. I sensed that it was time to take her home.

In the parking lot, she stopped abruptly near Emerson’s car. “Let’s key it,” she said, her eyes dancing maniacally. I assumed that this was just “Emily being Emily,” and tried to laugh it off. “Don’t be such a wuss,” she said, scratching “Waldo sucks” into the passenger door. I gently upbraided Miss Dickinson for her actions, which only served to inflame her: “Emerson’s trying to steal my juice, baby. It took me years to get where I am, understand what I’m saying? I used to run three-card monte on the streets of Newton. And I ain’t goin’ back!” At this moment, I found myself confronted with a possibility that I had never wanted to consider in all our years of friendship: Emily Dickinson was a real jerk.

Some years later, Boston University asked me to moderate a panel including Miss Dickinson, William Dean Howells, and the author, long since forgotten, of the verse “Finders, keepers/Losers, weepers.” I was by this time a successful poet in my own right, having become renowned for my series of “Happiness Is . . .” gift books and pillows. Seated next to Miss Dickinson, I attempted to mend the breach that had developed in our relationship; I went on at some length about my debt to her work. She took a sip of water, cleared her throat, and replied, “Bite me, you self-aggrandizing weasel.”

The last time I saw Emily Dickinson, she said she didn’t have time to speak, as she was on her way to the greyhound races in Taunton. But I could not let her go without asking what had happened to our friendship. Her eyes downcast, she said, simply, “You’ve got ketchup on your tie.” Quizzically, I lowered my head and took a right uppercut to the jaw. As I crumpled to the pavement, Miss Dickinson unleashed a profane tirade, along with a pistol-whipping that was startling for both its vigor and its efficiency.

As I review this last memory it occurs to me that some readers might conclude that I am trying to cast Emily Dickinson in a negative light. Nothing could be further from my intentions. In fact, when I regained consciousness I realized that Miss Dickinson, in her tirade, had given me a final, precious gift. True, I no longer had my wallet, but I had, at long last, a separate identity, a voice. And, perhaps most valuable of all, a rhyme for “Nantucket.”

1998

A
FUNNY
THING
HAPPENED

ROBERT BENCHLEY

THE PEOPLE WHO HAD THE HOUSE BEFORE

[STRANGE ADVENTURES OF THE NEXT TENANTS IN THE FAMOUS TWO-FAMILY HOUSE AT 21 MASSASOIT STREET, NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS]

O
CTOBER
1, 1930—Moved in today. Everything looks all right, clean, etc. The people who had the house before us were evidently good housekeepers. They
did
take away all the electric-light bulbs and base-plugs, but they probably paid for them themselves and so were within their rights. They might have left us the patent faucets on the bathtub, though. We can’t fill the tub without dishing water over from the washbowl.

One thing they did leave which seems kind of strange. Each room has an insurance calendar hanging in it and on the hall window-seat there is a pile of data on the New York Life Insurance Company’s special twenty-year endowment policy.

O
CTOBER
14—A rather peculiar thing happened today. We were sitting in the living-room when a couple of newspaper reporters with big cameras came up to the door and asked if we would mind sitting out on the porch and having our pictures taken. I said that I would have to put on my collar first, but the man said that it would make a better picture without it. More democratic, he said. He even said if I had those overalls handy to put them on. I said “What overalls?” and he just winked.

When we got out on the porch into the light, the photographers seemed a little surprised and sort of disappointed and talked together in a low tone. Then one of them said: “Who lives in the other side of the house?” I said that I didn’t know as we had just come to town ourselves from the West, but I thought their name was Walters. “You just moved in yourselves?” he asked, looking rather suspicious. “Weren’t you ever President of the United States?” I laughed and said not that I knew of, but that a few years ago there was a week when I was on the Shriners’ Convention that I might have been almost anything. “No, it would have had to have been longer than a week,” he said. Then he said to the other man: “Pack up your things, Ed. We got the wrong house.” And Ed said: “We should have ought to have done this job last spring when we got the assignment.”

So they went away and we never got our picture taken.

O
CTOBER
20—This afternoon the telephone rang and Edith answered it and Central said that the
Cosmopolitan Magazine
in New York City wanted to speak. So I went, being a great reader myself, and a girl’s voice said that she was speaking for Mr. Wong or Long and that my copy for the January number was due. I said that I hadn’t got my copy of the November number yet, and she said, “Not the copy
of,
but the copy
for,
the January number.” So I hung up.

O
CTOBER
21—We ran across something in the attic today which may explain something about the
Cosmopolitan
episode—but not much. Up behind one of the posts where we were putting our trunks Edith found a lot of yellow papers with “Cosmopolitan” typed in the upper left-hand corner of each. The first one had some sort of article begun on it, about a paragraph. It began: “My early life in Plymouth was just about the same sort of life that every God-fearing, healthy boy of that time was leading.” The next sheet had much the same sentence as a starter, only a few words longer. In the margin were some figures scribbled, which as near as we could make out were: “$1.00 per word. 23 words. $23.” The next sheet had the same sort of sentence only much longer: “I think that I may say without exaggeration that the early days of my boyhood, lived, as they were, amid the green hills of Plymouth, Vermont, were just the sort of days, taken one by one, as those which go to make up the average day of the typical healthy, God-fearing, honest and thrifty American boy of today in a town the size of Plymouth, Vermont, where Nature has a chance to imbue the growing youth with the principles of steadfast and pious observance of the laws of God and of the United States of America.” In the margin beside this were the figures: “96 words @ $1.00. $96.00,” and a note: “Ask Long about hyphenated words.”

As none of it seemed to make much sense, we threw the whole bunch of papers away.

O
CTOBER
23—Edith swore she saw a man wearing a cowboy suit hanging around the front walk tonight. I told her not to be silly, that there were no cowboys in Northampton.

O
CTOBER
24—This thing is beginning to get on my nerves. This afternoon four Indians in full regalia came up on the porch and rang the bell. Edith answered and the biggest Indian asked for “Big White Chief.” Edith told him that our name was Meakins and that maybe he wanted Walters, who lived in the other half of the house. The big Indian shook his head and said: “Come to pay call on Big White Chief. How-do?” Edith said: “I’m all right, thank you, but nobody here knows any Indians.” Then she called to me and said: “Unless you do, George. Do you know any Indians?” I called back and simply said: “No.” So Edith got a little cross by this time and said: “And what is more, we don’t want any sweet-grass baskets, either, so get along with you, all four of you.” This sent the Indians into a conference on the front steps and Edith came into the house and locked the door. We watched them from the bay window until they went away. I don’t like the looks of things in this neighborhood.

O
CTOBER
25—Well, things have about reached a climax. I saw the cowboy tonight. He was walking up and down in front of the house about half past ten. I watched him for a little while and saw him go around to the back of the house. I put the lights out and waited. Pretty soon I heard a key in the lock and the cowboy came in the front door walking very quietly. I snapped on the light and said: “I suppose you’re looking for those Indians. Well, they went away yesterday.” He seemed a little embarrassed. “Did you find any yellow papers here?” he asked. He talked more like a farmer than a cowboy, through his nose sort of. I said: “Yes, what’s it to you?” He said: “They were typewritten only on one side, weren’t they?” I said I hadn’t looked on both sides. “They belong to me,” he said, “and I wanted to use them up on the other side.” I told him that he was too late and that we had thrown them away. “And where did you get a key for this house?” I asked him. “I used to live here,” he said, and walked out. I called up the police and they said that there was a State Hospital near here and probably one of the inmates was loose, and if I saw him again to let them know right away.

O
CTOBER
26—The Indians came back today, bringing another one with them. We didn’t go to the door and watched them from the bay window until they went away. A small crowd gathered outside and began to cheer. We decided that they were from the State Hospital too, and Edith said she thought we ought to move.

O
CTOBER
27—Edith got so nervous last night thinking she heard the cowboy and the Indians again that we put some things into a suitcase and spent the night at the Draper Hotel. Have given up the house and are going to live in Holyoke.

1930

WILLIAM SHAWN

THE CATASTROPHE

O
N
the fourteenth of March, at exactly fourteen minutes to three in the morning, a meteor grazed the Manhattan skyline and fell into either the sea or the outskirts of Carlstadt, New Jersey. All astronomers having been asleep at the time, the world had to rely for data on such unscientific observers as two giddy airmail pilots, a scattering of cops, several non-union millworkers on the night shift, and a man going home from El Morocco. Even the New York
Daily News
had to base its eight-inch headline, “
METEOR ROCKS JERSEY,
” on the rumor that some windows had rattled in Trenton. As far as the insurance companies could find out, no one had been killed or injured, no damage had been done. In fact, everything considered, the phenomenon did not quite come off.

The next day, March the fifteenth, another meteor fell. This one, however, failed to disintegrate as it plunged through the earth’s atmosphere, nor did it sink itself into the traditional forest or desert. It landed, nice and tidy, on all five boroughs of Greater New York.

Within an hour, the Red Cross in Philadelphia launched a relief drive for the victims. Mayor Kelly of Chicago long-distanced Mayor LaGuardia to offer sympathies. Cinema theatres wired the New York Paramount office to rush them eyewitness newsreels. Western Union accepted the wires. Whereas, of course, there were no newsreels, no Mayor LaGuardia, no anything. Approximately seven and a half million New Yorkers, and over a half-million visitors from out of town (who cared very little for the city anyway), had been annihilated. The only New Yorkers who had escaped were those who chanced to be at Miami Beach, and there they remained, shaking their heads and trying to find someone who would cash their checks.

It was not until the newspapers, in simultaneous spurts of fancy, decided to reprint the New York telephone directories as an obituary notice that the country began to grasp the scope and connotations of what had happened. New York City, like Pompeii, was through. As a final grisly touch, N.B.C., its headquarters no longer in Rockefeller Center, broadcast a ten-minute dramatization of the Catastrophe (as it was already called) on a program which included a hot swing band and a talk by Glenn Frank. The American people were, at last, unnerved. Business took something of a bad turn. Control of the big corporations, suddenly left without boards of directors, reverted to the stockholders, who, left in turn without market quotations, were not any too sure there
were
corporations. Soon, too, the country was aware of a shortage of women’s wear, advertising campaigns, international bankers, O. O. McIntyre. Conditions were, as analyzed by Roger W. Babson, unsettled.

Then, inevitably, came the period of readjustment. Boston took over as the Eastern shipping centre. The gap in the American League was filled by the Baltimore Orioles; in the National, by the Toledo Mud Hens. Buffalo was made the terminus of the Twentieth Century. Then there was a wave of Catastrophe jokes (Catastrophe who?), followed by a cycle of Catastrophe films, in most of which Franchot Tone, who had come to be accepted as the typical extinct New Yorker, starred. Parker Brothers put out a game called Catastrophe. Around this time, a bill was introduced in Congress proposing that a New New York be built by the WPA. This died in committee. People were getting bored with the whole subject.

F
IVE
years passed, and New York City had disappeared from the last map. Ten years passed, and it had taken on the aspect of a dim exaggeration. Twenty years, and there was a full generation without a single first-hand New York memory. Eventually, the few old-timers who still claimed to have seen New York were regarded as cranks. They had to be humored when they talked about the electric signs on Broadway, the shops along Fifth Avenue, the subways, the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park and Harlem, the lobby of the Waldorf, the view from the Empire State Building. Nobody had the heart to tell them that New York had been invented by H. G. Wells.

1936

JAMES THURBER

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY

W
E’RE
going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa
-pocketa-pocketa.
The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” he shouted. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” repeated Lieutenant Berg. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” shouted the Commander. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. “The Old Man’ll get us through,” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!” . . .

“Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty. “What are you driving so fast for?”

“Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. “You were up to fifty-five,” she said. “You know I don’t like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five.” Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. “You’re tensed up again,” said Mrs. Mitty. “It’s one of your days. I wish you’d let Dr. Renshaw look you over.”

Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have her hair done. “Remember to get those overshoes while I’m having my hair done,” she said. “I don’t need overshoes,” said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. “We’ve been all through that,” she said, getting out of the car. “You’re not a young man any longer.” He raced the engine a little. “Why don’t you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?” Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. “Pick it up, brother!” snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.

. . . “It’s the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan,” said the pretty nurse. “Yes?” said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. “Who has the case?” “Dr. Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr. Remington from New York and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over.” A door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and haggard. “Hello, Mitty,” he said. “We’re having the devil’s own time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary. Wish you’d take a look at him.” “Glad to,” said Mitty.