When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it like a “comic regular.” And although it is becoming a lot more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing one of the most illustrious literary humorists of the present day era-among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, George S. Kaufman, Wayne 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 Laughter 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 very first time, the funniest work greater than seventy New Yorker contributors. Parodists undertake not only writers like Hemingway and Kerouac, but TV documentaries, Italian cinema, and etiquette books. (Enough have been released, Robert Benchley maintains, “that there should be no danger of toppling over ahead into the wrong soup, or engaging in arguments concerning which elbow belongs which arm.”) Various other pieces give perspectives over the levels of popularity, the depths of social 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 food, playing golf, and taxis, and plane tickets of extravagant that adhere to an apparently basic premise to the idea of no return, and sometimes well beyond. Right here you will see huge insights (Woody Allen: “How come man eliminate? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there has to be a beverage”) and hard-earned wisdom (Ian Frazier on dating your mom: “This is a harvested, experienced, adoring woman-one you do not have to visit a celebration or a singles bar to meet up, one there is no need to visit great lengths to know”). And, not least, significant amounts of helpful advice, including Steve Martin’s on memory space and middle age: “Weary? Here’s a means the over-fifty established can easily eliminate a good fifty percent hour: 1. Place your car keys inside your ideal hand. 2. Together with your left hand, call a friend and verify a your meal date. 3. Hang up the phone the telephone. 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 unforgettable slapstick prosody, aswell as forays by luminaries who ought to have known better, like Robert Graves, Elizabeth Bishop, and W. H. Auden.

A wonderful present for others, or a delightful deal with for oneself, Fierce Pajamas is a treasury of laughter from a publication described by Auden simply because “the best comic magazine in existence.”