Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (67 page)

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.

^*1
A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE:
Bergie was in this same class.

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

^*3
Schwanzleben, 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.’ ”

^*4
A 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.’ ”

^*5
Gunfy, 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.

^*6
A. 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.

^*7
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