Fierce Pajamas: Selected Humor Writing from The New Yorker Audiobook (Free)

When Harold Ross founded THE BRAND NEW Yorker in 1925, he described it being a “comic weekly.” And even though it is becoming a lot more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent center towards the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era-among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, George S. Kaufman, Adam Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Peter De Vries, Mike Nichols, Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen, Donald Barthelme, Calvin Trillin, George W. S. Trow, about Fierce Pajamas: Selected Humor Writing from THE BRAND NEW Yorker Veronica Geng, Garrison Keillor, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, Jr., Bruce McCall, Steve Martin, Christopher Buckley, and Paul Rudnick.

This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work greater than seventy New Yorker contributors. Parodists take on not only writers like Hemingway and Kerouac, but TV documentaries, Italian cinema, and etiquette books. (Plenty of have been published, Robert Benchley maintains, “that there must be no threat of toppling over ahead into the wrong soup, or engaging in arguments as to which elbow belongs which arm.”) Various other pieces present perspectives in the levels of fame, the depths of sociable embarrassment, and the ups and downs of love and sex. Such well-loved sketches as Thurber’s “The Secret Existence of Walter Mitty” consider their place alongside light-hearted essays on meals, rugby, and taxis, and plane tickets of elegant that adhere to an apparently simple premise to the point of no return, and sometimes well beyond. Right here you will see huge insights (Woody Allen: “Why does man eliminate? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there should be a drink”) and hard-earned intelligence (Ian Frazier on dating your mother: “Here is a harvested, experienced, adoring woman-one you do not have to visit a party or a singles pub to meet, one you do not have to visit great lengths to learn”). And, not least, significant amounts of advice, including Steve Martin’s on memory space and middle age: “Weary? Here’s a way the over-fifty arranged can easily eliminate a good fifty percent hour: 1. Place your vehicle keys in your right hand. 2. With your remaining hand, call a friend and confirm a lunch or dinner date. 3. Hang up the phone the phone. 4. Now search for your car keys.”

A rich selection of humorous verse includes caustic gems by Dorothy Parker, the effortless whimsy of Phyllis McGinley, and Ogden Nash’s memorable slapstick prosody, as well as forays by luminaries who must have known better, like Robert Graves, Elizabeth Bishop, and W. H. Auden.

A wonderful gift for others, or a wonderful treat for oneself, Fierce Pajamas is a treasury of laughter from a publication described simply by Auden as “the very best comic mag in existence.”