Word: yorkerism
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This is not a story by Franz Kafka or by one of his contemporary imitators. It is a recent dream remembered in precise detail by a successful New Yorker (one wife, three children, fair income, no analyst) who works with every outward appearance of contentment in one of Manhattan's new, midtown office buildings. Whatever Freudian or other analysis might make of it, the dream could serve as a perfect allegory for an era that is almost universally regarded as the Age of Anxiety. It speaks of big city towers in which life is lived in compartments and cubicles...
...happy. An up-from-the-ranks cop with the personality of a blunt instrument (TIME Cover, July 7, 1958), Steve Kennedy had to run an understaffed, underpaid army of 24,000 men, many of them good, some of them not, most of them as contentious as only a New Yorker -and a uniformed one at that-can be. Stubborn, straight as a pistol shot, he worked relentlessly for 5½ years to instill honesty, discipline and a sense of pride in New York's Finest, and along the way became just about the city's best police boss...
...frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Miss Gordimer is the author of two novels, The Lying Days and A World of Strangers. She has published three collections of short stories, titled The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Six Feet of the Country, and Friday's Footprints...
Benchley was associated with the New Yorker, and as MacDonald points out, so also were nearly all the good parodists of this century: Peter de Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, and E. B. White. Their victims' language is pleasantly familiar, and for that modern parodies seem the funniest. One probably has to be a kind of literary snob to appreciate parody anyway, and although we are often told solemnly that parody must be funny in itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash...
This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality...