BEFORE the folks at The New Yorker could reliably make anybody else laugh, they specialized in entertaining themselves. The magazine was launched in February of 1925, and its early issues were, to be charitable, hit or miss. Harold Ross, the founding editor, figured that the only thing in the debut issue that really worked was Rea Irvin’s cover portrait of Eustace Tilly, peering through his monocle at a butterfly.
But the workplace, by all accounts, was a riot. The irascible James Thurber caused a copy editor to faint when he burst in on him with a pistol in hand, yelling, “Are you the son of a bitch that keeps putting notes in red ink on the proofs of my Talk stories?” When Ross found Dorothy Parker at a speakeasy instead of at her desk, she had a ready—and, yes, often quoted—excuse: “Someone was using the pencil.” Then there was the drunk-dialing incident, when Ross had had too much Scotch and telephoned the great cartoonist Peter Arno in the middle of the night to tell him he was fired. (So much funnier the next day.) Rea Irvin, the magazine’s art editor, drew a not-for-public-consumption takeoff of the Eustace Tilly cover for the boss’s birthday: It featured a silhouette of Ross—an upward shock of hair, a limp cigarette dangling from his mouth—peering at a globular insect with a distinct resemblance to the drama critic Alexander Woollcott. A mannequin from Wanamaker’s (E. B. White had used pictures of it in a series of ads he composed for a 1927 circulation campaign) stood in Ross’s office, complete with a filthy hairpiece, for years after the joke was forgotten, which, for Ross, was exactly what made it funny.
The freshest stuff that appeared in the magazine back then was often self-parody, possibly more amusing to the staff than to anyone else. Much was made of the “vast organization” of The New Yorker; a picture of Grand Central Station was described in a caption as the magazine’s “sumptuous waiting room.” The truth is, the staff’s most inspired work in those days never made it beyond the vast organization; the in-house editorial memos (we reprint one of them, by the editor and writer Wolcott Gibbs) regularly outstripped anything that actually appeared in print. And then—the magazine found its voice, or voices.
A handful of people competing to make one another laugh: It’s not the worst way for an original comic enterprise to begin. Maybe it’s the only way. If something you did got a laugh from your friends, you wouldn’t be discouraged by the fact that most people didn’t get it; if you were on to something, plenty of those people would come around. More than anything, Ross wanted his magazine to be funny, but he didn’t want it to be funny the way other magazines were funny. The debut issue of The New Yorker printed a lame Q&A-style joke, which ended with the Q. Many assumed it was a typographical error; more likely, it was an absurdist, defiant assertion that the magazine wasn’t in the business of serving up conventional humor. In the magazine Ross wanted to create, there would be no setup/punch-line jokes—no knock-knocks, no “kids say the darnedest things” squibs, no afterdinner anecdotes, nothing about a priest and a rabbi walking into a bar.
It was one thing to avow what New Yorker humor wasn’t; it took a little longer to establish what it was. That’s where Thurber and White came in. In the Thumbelina realm of New Yorker history, Thurber and White were the framers of a comic constitution, our Adams and Jefferson, albeit without the cupping scars and slave children. They ranged widely in the forms they explored, and encouraged others to do so. Some of what the magazine published, as it hit its stride, was parody—of radio monologues, of what Ross called “journalese,” of advertising copy, of etiquette manuals, of the mannerisms of the great novelists. There were depictions of the sad-sack sufferer, an updated version of the silent-movie schlemiel. There were stories of comic happenings, real or imagined. There were waggish commentaries that did figure eights on the line of irony. There were the rants, presented straight, of the wildly unhinged or the obliviously self-satisfied.
Needless to say, every good writer at the magazine had his or her own voice, and his or her own devils. Dorothy Parker’s depictions of drunken or hungover heroines were no doubt influenced by her own boozy ways; and you can glimpse Thurber’s blighted first marriage—it’s like opening a freezer—in tales of connubial misery like “Quiet, Please,” “Not Together,” and (included in this anthology) “The Breaking Up of the Winships.” Yet something distinctive arose from the juxtaposition of all these voices. The marriage, like the hangovers, came to an end; the work has pretty much survived. Within a few years of the magazine’s launch, a contributor complained to a rejecting editor that a humor piece written for The New Yorker couldn’t be placed elsewhere: The magazine’s preferences were too idiosyncratic, too distant from what everyone else was up to. “We have evolved a system for the smooth operation of a literary bordello,” White later wrote. “The system is this: We write as we please, and the magazine publishes as it pleases. When the two pleasures coincide, something gets into print.”
There are no guns, toy or otherwise, at the magazine’s offices these days. The whole firing-while-drunk thing happens only rarely. That mannequin has long since disappeared (though we have our suspicions). Staff members have learned the hard way not to make fun of the boss’s coiffure, ever. But the bordello system that White described remains intact. It has functioned so well, in fact, that the magazine’s archives are full to bursting with humor, a goodly amount of it still humorous. Putting together an anthology of New Yorker humor writing is so much fun we’ve done it twice.
THE publication of our previous sampler, Fierce Pajamas, gave us pleasure; but also pain. For every piece we included, we left out two that we liked just as much. Between the anthology’s editors, second-guessing soon began in earnest. What could explain a blunder like (to name one of many) leaving out “Kimberley Solzhenitsyn’s Calendar”? Exactly which one of us was asleep at the wheel? Years of recrimination ensued. Styptic glances gave way to glowering stares and then long, wintry silences. If Disquiet, Please! is a follow-up, every follow-up is also, in certain respects, a do-over. In making our selections, we have therefore adhered to an especially rigorous methodology. First, we gathered pieces, not found in the previous anthology, that made us laugh, or beam, or both. Then, when those proved too numerous to fit into a book, we arranged the pieces in a circle and spun a bottle. Afterward, we recycled the bottle.
For all that, we could not escape the guilty knowledge that many of the funniest pieces that The New Yorker publishes aren’t exactly humor pieces. They are, rather, works of reporting, opinion, or criticism in which the comic eye and sensibility are fully engaged, and, as before, we couldn’t do them justice. Humor has never been segregated in the magazine that Ross founded. And yet the anthologist looks for density, for concentration—for an array of comic effects on display in a relatively small space. The difference between a humor piece and a humorous piece is the difference between attar of rose and actual roses. This is not to the discredit of roses, whose breeding and cultivation we hold in high esteem. It’s just that humorists are generally less encumbered than reporters or reviewers by the task of explaining how a bill was passed or a bridge was built, or what an actual person or movie is actually like. The journalist’s challenge is to paint an urn that must hold water. The humorist can turn a lump of clay into an urn that pointedly fails to.
In compiling this book, we also took full advantage of the fact that, since the last time around, we had almost a decade’s worth of new pieces to choose from, and we helped ourselves to those recent harvests with two hands, or maybe four. It’s what the founders would have done. Whether it was genius or dumb luck, Ross, White, Thurber, Gibbs, and the rest managed to do something that eluded even the incomparably gifted H. L. Mencken and George S. Nathan, who jointly piloted the long-defunct (and slightly New Yorker-ish) magazine Smart Set. They managed to create a magazine with an identity potent enough, yet capacious enough, to outlast them—a magazine that could be renewed and remade and remain recognizably itself. We thereby honor the Founders, in this collection, by giving them short shrift. (You’ll find them more decently represented in Fierce Pajamas, which also boasts a section of comic verse sufficient to forgo supplementation here.) We’ve instead devoted the balance of our space to their successors, their legatees. Most of the more recent comic talents we’ve included are still living, or very nearly; some are even young. In Disquiet, Please! we’ve taken the opportunity to present late-vintage wine from old vines (not old; established, really, or, let’s say, distinguished). But we’ve also had the particular pleasure of introducing previously unpublished contributors, such as Yoni Brenner or Simon Rich, who, we understand, was not yet born when Fierce Pajamas came out, and is not old enough to drink that wine. We have erred on the side of newness.
AND yet the new is never so new as all that. Men and women still drive each other nuts, just as in olden days. Self-delusion still generates insight. The entertainment industry is still seductive and silly. Our children still bring out the best in us, and the worst. Puffed-up literary piety still invites piercing. In convention-bound prose—ad copy, class notes, Zagat reviews, drug disclaimers, popularizations of impenetrable science, tonight’s specials, the gossip column—cliché is always just a few clicks away from preposterousness. Furry animals: You can never go wrong with them. And it’s still the case that (as White learned long ago) you should never get into an argument with a libertarian. At the cutting edge of comedy, you’ll find few moves that Thurber and White wouldn’t have recognized, and few they didn’t attempt.
Surveying the contributors to this anthology, across four generations, we’ve noticed other continuities, other patterns. We can now start to puzzle through a question we’re often asked: What makes a New Yorker humor writer? Is there a particular course of study, some people have even wondered, that can actually produce a New Yorker humorist? (The answer is yes, but Hunter College no longer offers it.) What sort of career experiences are helpful? Having researched this matter, we can offer a few pointers. Peter De Vries, as a young man, once played a wounded gorilla on a radio drama, and we can think of no better preparation for The New Yorker’s editorial process. Granted, there are other contenders. The world of advertising seems to be a pretty good incubator for wisenheimers. White himself served time writing ad copy (one of his first New Yorker pieces imagined what would happen if spring, the season, were an advertising account), and it’s a résumé he shares with such current contributors as Bruce McCall and John Kenney, who likewise know from the inside the codes and cadences they send up. Other humor writers have emerged from the world of newspapers (as Thurber did); a few from the underbelly of The New Yorker itself. So if you are unable to land a wounded-gorilla role, you might seek employment as a writer. And you needn’t restrict yourself to print. A number of classic New Yorker humorists—such as Benchley, Parker, Perelman, and later, in an unexampled way, Woody Allen—spent time writing for movies or television. That’s true, as well, about many more recent contributors, such as Paul Rudnick, Patricia Marx, Andy Borowitz, Larry Doyle, Paul Simms, and Yoni Brenner. For them, having suckled at the golden teat and grown rich off The New Yorker, working in Hollywood is a way of giving back to the community. It’s a heartening tradition, and we salute their generosity.
We salute, as well, the generosity of all those who helped us assemble this collection with their unstinting, if at times heated, advice (in a few instances, to be honest, “advice” is the word only if you stipulate that General MacArthur advised Tojo to surrender). We cannot list every counselor, but we’re particularly grateful to Leo Carey, whose comic sensibility is as finely tuned as a cello (a finely tuned cello, that is to say), and who has, rather precociously, become a redoubt of institutional memory; Susan Morrison, who has culled and edited the magazine’s Shouts and Murmurs—and nurtured its writers—for more than a decade; and Adam Gopnik, who conveyed the dire threats of an Old Testament prophet should a certain Thurber piece be left out (we chose not to discover whether his omniscience is matched by omnipotence). Andrea Walker gamely foraged through The New Yorker’s half-a-billion-word archives, searching, sorting, reading, organizing, and juggling logistical challenges with an agility that would do NASA proud. We’re grateful, as well, to the magazine’s deputy editor, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, not least for arranging this book’s publication, cunningly persuading Random House that, in return, it should pay The New Yorker a little something, rather than the other way around. Lynn Oberlander and Andrew Avery sorted through rights and permissions; Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey helped keep everything on track; Greg Captain lent a hand with the cover image. At Random House, Jennifer Hershey, Julia Cheiffetz, Millicent Bennett, and Evan Camfield helped turn a big messy stack of wrinkled, coffee-ringed photocopies into a tidily bound volume with a cover and everything, shipped to bookstores across the land. All these men and women did their part. Now it’s your turn.
There’s a story, possibly true, about the producer of a sitcom who once summoned a pair of staff writers to berate them about a script they’d just handed in. “The show’s supposed to be funny, and this just isn’t funny,” the producer said. “There’s not a laugh in it.” The writers, taken aback, protested that the script had some of the funniest writing they’d done. With the producer’s sufferance, they started to read it out loud. A page into it, the producer was convulsed with laughter. By the end of the first scene, he had fallen out of his chair and onto the floor, in helpless paroxysms, wildly signaling the writers to stop. At last, the producer recovered his breath, heaved himself back onto his chair, and grumbled, “Well, sure, if you’re going to read it like that.” Aside from begging your indulgence for this volume’s inexplicable omissions, casualties of the spinning bottle, we have very few requests to make of you, the reader. You should feel free to dip into this anthology randomly, to read it backward, to give it a home next to a porcelain commode. (Better there than on a high shelf.) All we ask is that you read it like that.