From Library Journal
Remnick, New Yorker editor since 1999, and Finder, the magazine's editorial director, recommend taking this book in small doses. However, New Yorker humor is not for everyone. Do not read this book if you suffer from an irony deficiency, or if you are currently taking any form of remedial English. Also, do not read this book if you are allergic to E.B. White, Robert Benchley, S.J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, Woody Allen, Veronica Geng, Steve Martin, or Jack Handey. Side effects include the urge to do literary research (to track down the targets of spoofs) and the discovery of some very funny writers who may be unknown to you. To learn more about the type of material contained in this book, consult Judith Yaross Lee's Defining New Yorker Humor (LJ 2/1/00). Ask your librarian if Fierce Pajamas is right for you. Available by prescription at public and academic libraries. Susan M. Colowick, North Olympic Lib. Syst., Port Angeles, WA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
THE NEW YORKER started life as a humor magazine and became much, much more. The unique and influential style of urbane, satiric jocularity it pioneered persists into the new century as the magazine continues to publish the nation's wittiest scribes. This joyous anthology presents characteristic representations of the old, new, and in-between. Members of the Algonquin Round Table are here, as well as James Thurber, E.B. White, Ogden Nash, Groucho Marx, and S.J. Perelman. On the contemporary side, we have Garrison Keillor and Steve Martin, among others. There are a few classics, such as Thurber's archetypal "Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and Woody Allen's "The Kugelmass Episode," in which a horny NYU prof magically slips between the sheets with Emma Bovary. Six fine pros divide the reading chores; their interpretations range from just above par to terrific. An essential album for anyone interested in the development of American humor in the 1900s. Y.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
“A complete delight from beginning to end.” —The New York Times

“Classic humor writing from a fantasy slumber party of writers.” —Vanity Fair

“Quite simply among the greatest stuff like this ever written . . . There is comic brilliance in these pages. . . . [Fierce Pajamas] is more than worth your time, your money and the potential damage to your funny bone.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“The New Yorker’s fine anthology of humor writing can inspire us to collectively bemoan the scarcity of a certain kind of printed comedy: the subtle and sophisticated type." —Newsday

Review
?A complete delight from beginning to end.? ?The New York Times

?Classic humor writing from a fantasy slumber party of writers.? ?Vanity Fair

?Quite simply among the greatest stuff like this ever written . . . There is comic brilliance in these pages. . . . [Fierce Pajamas] is more than worth your time, your money and the potential damage to your funny bone.? ?The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

?The New Yorker?s fine anthology of humor writing can inspire us to collectively bemoan the scarcity of a certain kind of printed comedy: the subtle and sophisticated type." ?Newsday

Book Description
When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he called it a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists in the modern era—among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Calvin Trillin, Garrison Keillor, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, Jr., Steve Martin, and Christopher Buckley. Fierce Pajamas is a treasury of laughter from the magazine W. H. Auden called the “best comic magazine in existence.”

Download Description
When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a "comic weekly". And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its heart to the founder's description, publishing virtually every accomplished practitioner of literary laughter of the modern era: James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, George W. S. Trow, Groucho Marx, Veronica Geng, Ian Frazier, Garrison Keillor, Woody Allen, Bruce McCall, Roz Chast, Roger Angell, Steve Martin, Christopher Buckley, Susan Orlean, Wendy Wasserstein. This anthology will gather together, for the first time, many of these great writers' greatest work. It will include not only the straight parodies and spoofs for which The New Yorker has become the talk of many towns, but also humorous full-blown short stories, hilarious landmark reviews, and reporting as funny as it is informative. A wonderful gift for others or a delightful present for oneself, Fierce Pajamas will present the best examples of literary laughter in all its variations from a publication that for decades has defined America's heartiest and most sophisticated sense of humor.

From the Inside Flap
When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he called it a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists in the modern era—among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Calvin Trillin, Garrison Keillor, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, Jr., Steve Martin, and Christopher Buckley. Fierce Pajamas is a treasury of laughter from the magazine W. H. Auden called the “best comic magazine in existence.”

From the Back Cover
“A complete delight from beginning to end.” —The New York Times

“Classic humor writing from a fantasy slumber party of writers.” —Vanity Fair

“Quite simply among the greatest stuff like this ever written . . . There is comic brilliance in these pages. . . . [Fierce Pajamas] is more than worth your time, your money and the potential damage to your funny bone.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“The New Yorker’s fine anthology of humor writing can inspire us to collectively bemoan the scarcity of a certain kind of printed comedy: the subtle and sophisticated type." —Newsday

About the Author
David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker.

Henry Finder is the editorial director of The New Yorker.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
SPOOFS
WOLCOTT GIBBS
DEATH IN THE RUMBLE SEAT WITH THE USUAL APOLOGIES TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY,
WHO MUST BE PRETTY SICK OF THIS SORT OF THING
Most people don’t like the pedestrian part, and it is best not to look at that if you can help it. But if you can’t help seeing them, long-legged and their faces white, and then the shock and the car lifting up a little on one side, then it is best to think of it as something very unimportant but beautiful and necessary artistically. It is unimportant because the people who are pedestrians are not very important, and if they were not being cogido by automobiles it would just be something else. And it is beautiful and necessary because, without the possibility of somebody getting cogido, driving a car would be just like anything else. It would be like reading “Thanatopsis,” which is neither beautiful nor necessary, but hogwash. If you drive a car, and don’t like the pedestrian part, then you are one of two kinds of people. Either you haven’t very much vitality and you ought to do something about it, or else you are yellow and there is nothing to be done about it at all.

If you don’t know anything about driving cars you are apt to think a driver is good just because he goes fast. This may be very exciting at first, but afterwards there is a bad taste in the mouth and the feeling of dishonesty. Ann Bender, the American, drove as fast on the Merrick Road as anybody I have ever seen, but when cars came the other way she always worked out of their terrain and over in the ditch so that you never had the hard, clean feeling of danger, but only bumping up and down in the ditch, and sometimes hitting your head on the top of the car. Good drivers go fast too, but it is always down the middle of the road, so that cars coming the other way are dominated, and have to go in the ditch themselves. There are a great many ways of getting the effect of danger, such as staying in the middle of the road till the last minute and then swerving out of the pure line, but they are all tricks, and afterwards you know they were tricks, and there is nothing left but disgust.

The cook: I am a little tired of cars, sir. Do you know any stories?

I know a great many stories, but I’m not sure that they’re suitable.

The cook: The hell with that.

Then I will tell you the story about God and Adam and naming the animals. You see, God was very tired after he got through making the world. He felt good about it, but he was tired so he asked Adam if he’d mind thinking up names for the animals.

“What animals?” Adam said.

“Those,” God said.

“Do they have to have names?” Adam said.

“You’ve got a name, haven’t you?” God said.

I could see–

The cook: How do you get into this?

Some people always write in the first person, and if you do it’s very hard to write any other way, even when it doesn’t altogether fit into the context. If you want to hear this story, don’t keep interrupting.

The cook: O.K.

I could see that Adam thought God was crazy, but he didn’t say anything. He went over to where the animals were, and after a while he came back with the list of names.

“Here you are,” he said.

God read the list, and nodded.
“They’re pretty good,” he said. “They’re all pretty good except that last one.”

“That’s a good name,” Adam said. “What’s the matter with it?”

“What do you want to call it an elephant for?,” God said.

Adam looked at God.

“It looks like an elephant to me,” he said.

The cook: Well?

That’s all.

The cook: It is a very strange story, sir.

It is a strange world, and if a man and a woman love each other, that is strange too, and what is more, it always turns out badly.

In the golden age of car-driving, which was about 1910, the sense of impending disaster, which is a very lovely thing and almost nonexistent, was kept alive in a number of ways. For one thing, there was always real glass in the windshield so that if a driver hit anything, he was very definitely and beautifully cogido. The tires weren’t much good either, and often they’d blow out before you’d gone ten miles. Really, the whole car was built that way. It was made not only so that it would precipitate accidents but so that when the accidents came it was honestly vulnerable, and it would fall apart, killing all the people with a passion that was very fine to watch. Then they began building the cars so that they would go much faster, but the glass and the tires were all made so that if anything happened it wasn’t real danger, but only the false sense of it. You could do all kinds of things with the new cars, but it was no good because it was all planned in advance. Mickey Finn, the German, always worked very far into the other car’s terrain so that the two cars always seemed to be one. Driving that way he often got the faender, or the clicking when two cars touch each other in passing, but because you knew that nothing was really at stake it was just an empty classicism, without any value because the insecurity was all gone and there was nothing left but a kind of mechanical agility. It is the same way when any art gets into its decadence. It is the same way about s-x–

The cook: I like it very much better when you talk about s-x, sir, and I wish you would do it more often.
I have talked a lot about s-x before, and now I thought I would talk about something else.

The cook: I think that is very unfortunate, sir, because you are at your best with s-x, but when you talk about automobiles you are just a nuisance.


From the Hardcover edition.

FROM OUR EDITORS

For humor writing, no magazine in American history can match the achievement of The New Yorker. Since the 1920s, this Manhattan-based weekly has been hosting an unequalled list of comic geniuses from Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and Ogden Nash to Calvin Trillin, Steve Martin, and Roy Blount Jr. This anthology collects all the aforementioned, plus mirth-raisers like Groucho Marx, Woody Allen, Garrison Keillor, Robert Benchley, Ian Frazier, S. J. Perelman, and, believe it or not, W. H. Auden.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to 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, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Peter De Vries, Mike Nichols, Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen, Donald Barthelme, Calvin Trillin, George W. S. Trow, 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 of more than seventy New Yorker contributors. Parodists take on not only writers like Hemingway and Kerouac, but TV documentaries, Italian cinema, and etiquette books. (Enough have been published, Robert Benchley maintains, “that there should be no danger of toppling over forward into the wrong soup, or getting into arguments as to which elbow belongs on which arm.”) Other pieces offer perspectives on the heights of fame, the depths of social embarrassment, and the ups and downs of love and sex. Such well-loved sketches as Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” take their place alongside light-hearted essays on food, tennis, and taxis, and flights of fancy that follow an apparently simple premise to the point of no return, and sometimes well beyond. Here you will find large insights (Woody Allen: “Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage”) andhard-earned wisdom (Ian Frazier on dating your mom: “Here is a grown, experienced, loving woman—one you do not have to go to a party or a singles bar to meet, one you do not have to go to great lengths to know”). And, not least, a great deal of helpful advice, including Steve Martin’s on memory and middle age: “Bored? Here’s a way the over-fifty set can easily kill a good half hour: 1. Place your car keys in your right hand. 2. With your left hand, call a friend and confirm a lunch or dinner date. 3. Hang up the phone. 4. Now look 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 unforgettable slapstick prosody, as well as forays by luminaries who ought to have known better, like Robert Graves, Elizabeth Bishop, and W. H. Auden.

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

SYNOPSIS

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a ￯﾿ﾽcomic weekly.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal