Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (69 page)

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

G
EORGE
S. K
AUFMAN
(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.

G
ARRISON
K
EILLOR
(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.

A
NTHONY
L
ANE
(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.

J
OHN
L
ARDNER
(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.

D
ON
M
ARQUIS
(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.

S
TEVE
M
ARTIN
(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.

G
ROUCHO
M
ARX
(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.

B
RUCE
M
C
C
ALL
(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.

P
HYLLIS
M
C
G
INLEY
(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.

C
HARLES
M
C
G
RATH
(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.

T
HOMAS
M
EEHAN
(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.

D
ANIEL
M
ENAKER
(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.

L
OUIS
M
ENAND
(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.

H
OWARD
M
OSS
(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.

V
LADIMIR
N
ABOKOV
(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.

O
GDEN
N
ASH
(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
.”

M
IKE
N
ICHOLS
(b. 1931) was born in Berlin, came to America at the age of seven, and attended the University of Chicago. He became famous in the late 1950s as part of an improvisational comic duo with Elaine May. In the 1960s, he turned to directing, first on Broadway and then in films. His seventeen films include
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate,
and
Primary Colors.

S
USAN
O
RLEAN
(b. 1955) has been writing for
The New Yorker
since 1987 and became a staff writer in 1992. Her work has also appeared in
Outside, Rolling Stone, Vogue,
and
Esquire,
and her books include
Saturday Night, The Orchid Thief,
and
The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup.

D
AVID
O
WEN
(b. 1955) is a staff writer and golf enthusiast. His books include
High School, The Walls Around Us, My Usual Game,
and
The Making of the Masters.

D
OROTHY
P
ARKER
(1893–1967), famed as an Algonquin Round Table regular, wrote for
The New Yorker
from its second issue, in 1925, until the end of 1957. She contributed poems, stories, and theater reviews and was also known for her book reviews, written under the pseudonym Constant Reader. Her poetry collection
Enough Rope
was a best-seller in 1926 and was followed by three other volumes. She moved to Hollywood to work with Alan Campbell, her second husband, as a screenwriter. They received an Oscar nomination for
A Star Is Born
(1937).

S. J. P
ERELMAN
(1904–1979) grew up in Providence and attended Brown University, where he edited the humor magazine. When, in 1929, the publisher of his first book,
Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge,
sent a copy to Groucho Marx for a blurb, Perelman was taken on as a scriptwriter and worked on two Marx Brothers movies,
Monkey Business
and
Horse
Feathers.
His first
New Yorker
piece appeared in the 1930s, and he went on to contribute nearly three hundred others, which were collected in such books as
Strictly from Hunger
and
The Road to
Miltown, or, Under the Spreading Atrophy.
He also collaborated on the stage comedies
All Good Americans
and
One Touch of Venus,
and shared an Oscar in 1957 for the script of
Around the World in Eighty Days.

L
EONARD
Q. R
OSS
was a pseudonym of L
EO
R
OSTEN
(1908–1997), who was born in Lodz, Poland, and immigrated to Chicago with his family soon after. Rosten obtained a doctorate in social sciences from the University of Chicago and also studied at the London School of Economics. He claimed that he encountered the original of his famous comic character, Hyman Kaplan, while he was teaching English in night school. The malapropian Kaplan first appeared in
The New Yorke
r in 1936 and in book form a year later. Two further volumes later appeared, and the series was briefly staged as a Broadway musical. Rosten is also well known for
The Joys of Yiddish
(1968), an informal lexicon liberally sprinkled with anecdote and humor.

P
AUL
R
UDNICK
(b. 1957) was born in New Jersey and graduated from Yale. His plays include
I Hate Hamlet; The Naked Eye; The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told; Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach;
and
Jeffrey,
which was also made into a movie. His screenplays include
Addams Family Values
and
In & Out.
He is the author of two novels,
Social Disease
and
I’ll Take It,
and a collection of movie reviews written by his alter ego, Libby Gelman-Waxner.

C
ATHLEEN
S
CHINE
(b. 1953) is a novelist.
The Love Letter,
a national best-seller, was translated into fifteen languages. Her other novels include
Alice in Bed, Rameau’s Niece,
and
The Evolution of Jane.

W
ILLIAM
S
HAWN
(1907–1992), the longest-serving editor of
The New Yorker
, was born in Chicago and came on staff in 1933 as a Talk of the Town writer. He turned to editing after a couple of years and became managing editor in 1939. He succeeded Harold Ross in 1952, editing the magazine until 1987.

U
PTON
S
INCLAIR
(1878–1968) wrote dime novels from the age of fifteen and made his reputation in 1906 with
The Jungle,
a novel that exposed working conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. He stood, unsuccessfully, as the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934. His popular Lanny Budd series of novels appeared from 1940 to 1953. “How to Be Obscene” was his only work for
The New Yorker.

M
ARK
S
INGER
(b. 1950) has been a staff writer at
The New Yorker
since 1974. He is the author of three books,
Funny Money, Mr. Personality,
and
Citizen K.

S
USAN
S
ONTAG
(b. 1933) enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley at the age of fifteen and, after studies at the University of Chicago, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, settled in New York. Her wide-ranging essays on aesthetics, culture, and politics include
Against Interpretation, Illness as Metaphor, Styles of Radical Will,
and
On Photography.
She has also written films, plays, and four novels, among them
The Volcano Lover
and
In America.

R
UTH
S
UCKOW
(1892–1960) was born in Iowa and lived there for most of her life. She published her first poetry in 1918 and her first short story in 1921. Her first novel,
Country People,
appeared in 1924. She contributed to
The New Yorker
from 1927 to 1937. She published eleven books in her lifetime, leaving a novel unfinished when she died.