Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (50 page)

THE ASTOUNDING STRING

ILLUSION:

A piece of string, which for some reason has been run through two cylindrical pieces of wood, and for some other reason has two small glass beads attached to either end, is cut with a knife so that it hangs in two distinct pieces. This in itself is startling enough. But when the two cylinders are placed together and subjected to the influence of the wand, with the result that the string is again pulled back and forth between them as freely as it ever was, the effect is electric.

EXPLANATION:

Never quite clear, even to the magician. Somehow the string is either joined together, or another piece of string run through the cylinders, or
some
thing. Owing to this haziness concerning the basic principles of the trick, it was not always performed with complete success, and very often not even tried. What is worth doing at all is worth doing well.

MIND-READING

ILLUSION:

(This is a feat based on a similar, though more elaborate, one performed in India.)

A member of the audience leaves the room and the rest decide on some object which he is to be “willed” to touch when he returns. Let us say that it is a hassock. The absentee is then sent for and the “control” (the magician himself) fixes his gaze on him and says: “Will you hassock ice cream?” Immediately, the “subject” walks across the room and touches a plate of ice cream. Pandemonium ensues.

EXPLANATION:

The one who leaves the room is in reality a
confederate
of the magician, who has been practicing the act since three o’clock in the afternoon. It has been agreed that, whatever the object to be touched is, the “control” will introduce its name into a sentence apparently spoken at random. Thus, if the object selected has been a radiator, the sentence would be “Have you had any radiators today?” (Catch on?) Where the instance quoted above was faulty was that
two
possibilities were mentioned in the same sentence. Eternal vigilance is the only guard against this sort of slip-up.

THUS we see that, no matter how mystifying a feat of legerdemain or mind-reading may be, there is always an explanation for it somewhere in the archives of Black Art. But, human nature being what it is, people would much rather be fooled in this manner than deal, day in and day out, with the obvious and transparent things of life.

Once again I apologize to the Society of Magicians for “spilling the beans.”

1933

ROBERT BENCHLEY

WHY WE LAUGH—OR DO WE?

(LET’S GET THIS THING SETTLED, MR. EASTMAN)

I
N
order to laugh at something, it is necessary (1) to know
what
you are laughing at, (2) to know
why
you are laughing, (3) to ask some people why
they
think you are laughing, (4) to jot down a few notes, (5) to laugh. Even then, the thing may not be cleared up for days.

All laughter is merely a compensatory reflex to take the place of sneezing. What we really want to do is sneeze, but as that is not always possible, we laugh instead. Sometimes we underestimate our powers and laugh and sneeze at the same time. This raises hell all around.

The old phrase “That is nothing to sneeze at” proves my point. What is obviously meant is “That is nothing to
laugh
at.” The wonder is that nobody ever thought of this explanation of laughter before, with the evidence staring him in the face like that.
^*3

We sneeze because we are thwarted, discouraged, or devil-may-care. Failing a sneeze, we laugh,
faute de mieux.
Analyze any funny story or comic situation at which we “laugh” and it will be seen that this theory is correct. Incidentally, by the time you have the “humor” analyzed, it will be found that the necessity for laughing has been relieved.

Let us take the well-known joke about the man who put the horse in the bathroom.
^*4
Here we have a perfect example of the thought-sneeze process, or, if you will, the sneeze-thought process. The man, obviously an introvert, was motivated by a will-to-dominate-the-bathroom, combined with a desire to be superior to the other boarders. The humor of the situation may
seem
to us to lie in the tag line “I want to be able to say, ‘Yes, I know,’ ” but we laugh at the joke
subconsciously
long before this line comes in. In fact, what we are really laughing (or sneezing) at is the idea of someone’s telling us a joke that we have heard before.

Let us suppose that the story was reversed, and that a
horse
had put a
man
into the bathroom. Then our laughter would have been induced by the idea of a landlady’s asking a horse a question and the horse’s answering—an entirely different form of joke.

The man would then have been left in the bathroom with nothing to do with the story. Likewise, if the man had put the
landlady
into the bathroom, the
horse
would obviously have been
hors de combat
(still another form of joke, playing on the similarity in sound between the word “horse” and the French word “
hors,
” meaning “
out
of.” Give up?).

Any joke, besides making us want to sneeze, must have five cardinal points, and we must check up on these first before giving in:

(1) The joke must be in a language we can understand.

(2) It must be spoken loudly enough for us to hear it, or printed clearly enough for us to read it.

(3) It must be about
some
thing. You can’t just say, “Here’s a good joke” and let it go at that. (You
can,
but don’t wait for the laugh.)

(4) It must deal with either frustration or accomplishment, inferiority or superiority, sense or nonsense, pleasantness or unpleasantness, or, at any rate, with some emotion that can be analyzed, otherwise how do we know when to laugh?

(5) It must begin with the letter “W.”
^*5

Now, let us see just how our joke about the horse in the bathroom fulfills these specifications. Using the
Gestalt,
or Rotary-Frictional, method of taking the skin off a joke, we can best illustrate by making a diagram of it. We have seen that every joke must be in a language that we can understand and spoken (or written) so clearly that we can hear it (or see it). Otherwise we have this:

Joke which we cannot hear, see, or understand the words of.

You will see in Figure 2 that we go upstairs with the man and the horse as far as the bathroom. Here we become conscious that it is not a
true
story, something we may have suspected all along but didn’t want to say anything about. This sudden revelation of
absurdity
(from the Latin
ab
and
surdus,
meaning “out of deafness”) is represented in the diagram by an old-fashioned whirl.

The horse-in-bathroom story under ideal conditions.

Following the shock of realization that the story is not real, we progress in the diagram to the point where the landlady protests. Here we come to an actual
fact,
or factual
act.
Any landlady in her right mind
would
protest against a horse’s being shut in her bathroom. So we have, in the diagram, a return to normal ratiocination, or Crowther’s Disease, represented by the wavy line. (Whoo-hoo!)

From then on, it is anybody’s joke. The whole thing becomes just ludicrous. This we can show in the diagram by the egg-and-dart design, making it clear that something has definitely gone askew. Personally, I think that what the man
meant
to say was “That’s no horse—that’s my wife,” but that he was inhibited. (Some of these jokes even
I
can’t seem to get through my head.)
^*6

1937

S. J. PERELMAN

INSERT FLAP “A” AND THROW AWAY

O
NE
stifling summer afternoon last August, in the attic of a tiny stone house in Pennsylvania, I made a most interesting discovery: the shortest, cheapest method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected. In this technique (eventually adopted by the psychology department of Duke University, which will adopt anything), the subject is placed in a sharply sloping attic heated to 340°F, and given a mothproof closet known as the Jiffy-Cloz to assemble. The Jiffy-Cloz, procurable at any department store or neighborhood insane asylum, consists of half a dozen gigantic sheets of red cardboard, two plywood doors, a clothes rack, and a packet of staples. With these is included a set of instructions mimeographed in pale-violet ink, fruity with phrases like “Pass Section F through Slot AA, taking care not to fold tabs behind washers (see Fig. 9).” The cardboard is so processed that as the subject struggles convulsively to force the staple through, it suddenly buckles, plunging the staple deep into his thumb. He thereupon springs up with a dolorous cry and smites his knob (Section K) on the rafters (RR). As a final demonic touch, the Jiffy-Cloz people cunningly omit four of the staples necessary to finish the job, so that after indescribable purgatory, the best the subject can possibly achieve is a sleazy, capricious structure which would reduce any self-respecting moth to helpless laughter. The cumulative frustration, the tropical heat, and the soft, ghostly chuckling of the moths are calculated to unseat the strongest reason.

In a period of rapid technological change, however, it was inevitable that a method as cumbersome as the Jiffy-Cloz would be superseded. It was superseded at exactly nine-thirty Christmas morning by a device called the Self-Running 10-Inch Scale-Model Delivery-Truck Kit Powered by Magic Motor, costing twenty-nine cents. About nine on that particular morning, I was spread-eagled on my bed, indulging in my favorite sport of mouth-breathing, when a cork fired from a child’s air gun mysteriously lodged in my throat. The pellet proved awkward for a while, but I finally ejected it by flailing the little marksman (and his sister, for good measure) until their welkins rang, and sauntered in to breakfast. Before I could choke down a healing fruit juice, my consort, a tall, regal creature indistinguishable from Cornelia, the Mother of the Gracchi, except that her foot was entangled in a roller skate, swept in. She extended a large, unmistakable box covered with diagrams.

“Now don’t start making excuses,” she whined. “It’s just a simple cardboard toy. The directions are on the back—”

“Look, dear,” I interrupted, rising hurriedly and pulling on my overcoat, “it clean slipped my mind. I’m supposed to take a lesson in crosshatching at Zim’s School of Cartooning today.”

“On Christmas?” she asked suspiciously.

“Yes, it’s the only time they could fit me in,” I countered glibly. “This is the big week for crosshatching, you know, between Christmas and New Year’s.”

“Do you think you ought to go in your pajamas?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s O.K.” I smiled. “We often work in our pajamas up at Zim’s. Well, goodbye now. If I’m not home by Thursday, you’ll find a cold snack in the safe-deposit box.” My subterfuge, unluckily, went for naught, and in a jiffy I was sprawled on the nursery floor, surrounded by two lambkins and ninety-eight segments of the Self-Running 10-Inch Scale-Model Delivery-Truck Construction Kit.

THE theory of the kit was simplicity itself, easily intelligible to Kettering of General Motors, Professor Millikan, or any first-rate physicist. Taking as my starting point the only sentence I could comprehend, “Fold down on all lines marked ‘fold down;’ fold up on all lines marked ‘fold up,’ ” I set the children to work and myself folded up with an album of views of Jane Russell. In a few moments, my skin was suffused with a delightful tingling sensation and I was ready for the second phase, lightly referred to in the directions as “Preparing the Spring Motor Unit.” As nearly as I could determine after twenty minutes of mumbling, the Magic Motor (“No Electricity—No Batteries—Nothing to Wind—Motor Never Wears Out”) was an accordion-pleated affair operating by torsion, attached to the axles. “It is necessary,” said the text, “to cut a slight notch in each of the axles with a knife (see Fig. C). To find the exact place to cut this notch, lay one of the axles over diagram at bottom of page.”