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A stickler for precise language would probably argue that the bookstore shelf labelled “Humor” should really say “Attempts at Humor,” since the word standing alone implies that everyone will be amused. (Describing yourself as a humorist, Ring Lardner said, would be like a baseball player who’d been asked which position he plays saying, “I’m a great third baseman.”) What strikes one person as funny might strike another person as not funny at all. If that scowling man at one of the near tables doesn’t think what the comic just said was funny, there’s no use trying to persuade him that it was. A reminder that the audience at the dinner show found the same joke hilarious wouldn’t help.
For those of us whose attempts at humor are mostly written rather than verbal, the audience is an editor—an audience we, unlike the standup comic, have to please without the tools of timing or expression. In the first decades of my time at The New Yorker, the pieces that we were trying to sell—the sort of light pieces that would these days run under the rubric of Shouts & Murmurs or possibly Personal History—were referred to around the office as “casuals.” Some of the people submitting casuals were, like me, reporters who thought of casual-writing as a sideline. Some were fiction writers drawing a small salary that was ostensibly for writing Talk of the Town pieces. Some were people with no connection to the magazine who simply thought they had come up with something funny. Burton Bernstein, a colleague who published a biography of James Thurber, the nonpareil producer of casuals, wrote once that the casual, which sounds like something tossed off, is actually “one of the more difficult and painstaking forms of writing known to humankind.” Contemplating casual-writing over the past fifty years or so, I’m reminded of how I began a talk I once gave to people graduating from Columbia with master’s-of-fine-arts degrees. “When I tried to think of an appropriate subject for people going into the fields you’re going into,” I said, “the only thing I could come up with was ‘Rejection.’ ” It’s not that we didn’t sell some casuals. But what stands out in my memory is rejection.
Burt Bernstein, for instance, worked for untold hours on a palindromic casual. It was in the form of a play called “Look, Ma, I Am Kool!,” and it had characters delivering lines like “Nail a timid god on rood. Door no dog, dim Italian.” The New Yorker passed. The alternative market for palindromic casuals was not large. Some months later, Burt showed up at my office to announce that he was compiling and editing a book of casuals written by the generation that followed the legendary era of New Yorker writers like Thurber and Benchley and White and Perelman. He asked if I had any pieces that might be included.
“If I may ask,” I said, “am I correct in thinking that this is essentially a scheme you’ve hatched to get ‘Look, Ma, I Am Kool!’ into print?”
“But of course,” Burt said cheerfully.
“In that case,” I said, “Count me in.”
For a time, the magazine had a policy of tacking on a bonus for anyone who sold six casuals in a calendar year. As I recall, the bonus was a higher rate for casuals sold during the remainder of the year, but I always imagined it as something akin to the pinball machine in the movie version of William Saroyan’s “Time of Your Life”: when the machine is finally beaten, lights flash and bells ring and an American flag pops out to wave while “America” is played. Toward the end of one year in what must have been the mid-sixties, Tom Meehan and I had both sold five, and our typewriters were burning up. Tom had written one of the magazine’s iconic casuals—“Yma Dream,” presented as his dream of hosting a party at which he has to introduce people with names like Yma Sumac and Uta Hagen (“ ‘Ona and Ida,’ I say, ‘surely you know Yma and Ava? Ida, Ona—Oona, Abba.’ ”) But he couldn’t come up with the sixth casual that year. Neither could I. When I think of that period, the visual metaphor that comes to my mind is Tom and I meeting on the stairs between our floor and the appropriate editor’s office, one of us carrying a rejected casual and one of us carrying a casual that is about to be rejected.
In the mid-seventies, Tom, a lovely man, seemed to be struggling. His wife was not well. Writing casuals and free-lance pieces was a chancy occupation for a man with a family to support, and the project he’d spent years working on otherwise, the book for a musical, had the marks of a nonpaying long shot. Then, in 1977, the musical actually made it to Broadway. It was “Annie.” It won Tom the first of what turned out to be three Tony Awards, and it seemed destined to run forever.
Not long after “Annie” opened, my wife and daughters and I had tea with Tom and some of the kids who appeared in the musical. I told Tom that everyone at the magazine was delighted about his reversal of fortune. He said that there had been a time when he was beginning to feel like that Woody Allen character in “Annie Hall,” who said life is divided into the terrible and the miserable.
“A Broadway hit can change a lot,” I said.
Tom smiled, and said, quietly, “Smash hit.”
That same year, Burt Bernstein’s anthology was published. It contained, after an astute foreword by Burt on the state of what he termed “literate humor,” contributions from a wide range of casual writers. (I contributed two of my favorites—both New Yorker rejects that had eventually found homes in other magazines.) The title of the anthology was “Look, Ma, I Am Kool! And Other Casuals.”
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