SOURCE: "Laugh and Lie Down," in Partisan Review, Vol. IV, No. 1, December, 1937, pp. 44-53.

[An American essayist and critic, Macdonald was a noted proponent of various radical causes from the mid-1930s until his death in 1982. In the following excerpt, he criticizes the attitudes and editorial style that he considers representative of the New Yorker.]

More persistently than any other American magazine the New Yorker has exploited a distinctive attitude towards modern life. The typical New Yorker writer has given up the struggle to make sense out of a world which daily grows more complicated. His stock of data is strictly limited to the inconsequential. His Weltanschauung—a term which would greatly irritate him—is the crudest sort of philistine "common sense." But unlike most exponents of "common sense," the New Yorker type is spectacularly incompetent in the practical affairs of everyday life. He is abashed by machines, easily dominated by extraverts, incapable of making out an income tax return, in constant difficulties with the gas company, his landlord, and The State. Out of these limitations the New Yorker extracts its peculiar kind of humor: the humor of the inadequate.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that the New Yorker's contributors are by no means as feckless as, for literary purposes, they choose to appear. Their ignorance is no more to be taken seriously than the ironic humility with which Socrates treats his opponents. Quite deliberately, they prune their talents into a certain shape, and if this means extensive intellectual amputations, so much the worse for the intellect. The magazine has its tone, to which its contributors keep with faithful ear. It is the tone of a cocktail party at which the guests are intelligent but well-bred. No subjects are taboo, so long as they are "amusing." But, as any experienced hostess knows, too earnest handling rubs off the bloom. Moderation in all things, including humor. The New Yorker has been known to reject contributions because they were too funny. Its editors would have considered Mark Twain too crude and Heine too high-brow for their purposes. Between reality and its readers the New Yorker interposes a decent veil, which would be rent by any immoderate inspiration on its writers' part.

If there is an octopus-like humor trust, twining its tentacles around the nation's best wit, the New Yorker is it. There are no competitors. Life is no longer humorous, Judge has no prestige, and the rest are at or below the College Humor level. Current publishers' lists contain no less than seven volumes of New Yorker material. In thirteen years the New Yorker has become an institution comparable to Punch.

The New Yorker owes its present dominance to the fact that it is the only important vehicle for the humor of the urban intelligentsia. From the Civil War to the World War, the dominant school of humor based itself on the small-town culture of the hinterland. Humorists like Artemus Ward and Bill Nye attacked the big bourgeoisie of the East in their cultural outworks at the same time as their political allies, the populists, attacked the East in its economic citadel: Wall Street. The War destroyed the populist position in humor as in politics, and it laid the economic foundation for the triumph of Big Business in the twenties. In the post-war Kulturkampf the provinces steadily lost ground to the intelligentsia of the big cities. Populist humor gave way to sophisticated humor: Petroleum V. Nasby yielded to Robert Benchley.

The new humor was of two schools: Menckenian satire and the dissociative, or dada, humor introduced by Benchley and Frank Sullivan. Most humorists were influenced by both schools. Ring Lardner, for example, practiced Menckenian satire in his short stories, and also produced dada work like his autobiography (The Story of a Wonder Man). Lardner began his career in the Saturday Evening Post and ended it in the New Yorker. This shift of allegiance was probably not a conscious strategem. Even in his earliest stories there is an undertone of satire, not enough to interfere with their success in the popular press but quite definitely there. The shift in humor merely allowed Lardner to say directly what he had always thought about the provinces.

The New Yorker will be thirteen years old next February. Since 1925 it has changed little in form, much in its point of view. "The Talk of the Town" and "Profiles," still its most important departments, were established under those names in the first issue. From the first, also, headings were set in the distinctive angular type-face used today. By 1927 the New Yorker had differentiated itself from the other humorous weeklies. The scraps of verse and prose conventional to such journals had been replaced by a few long contributions. The first number contained a pioneer one-line joke, and within two years the New Yorker had made this form of humor peculiarly its own. But if externals have changed little, editorial policies have been revolutionized.

The New Yorker was established to exploit commercially two groups of sophisticated readers: those who followed Mencken and Nathan and those who looked to the Manhattan wits centering around the Algonquin Hotel. Its keynote was: "Not edited for the Old Lady from Dubuque." It had been appearing only a few months when the Scopes evolution trial in Tennessee took place. Here was the perfect, foolproof issue: the clash of cultures in its crudest form. No literate reader but was with Darrow and Darwin against Bryan and the Bible. Furthermore, Bryan was the personal symbol of all that was most hateful and absurd to the East. The editors of the New Yorker sensed complete reader-support. Week after week they printed cartoons lampooning Bryan, cartoons of a brutality unique in its history. They ran editorials, articles, eyewitness accounts of the trial. For a time it almost seemed that the New Yorker had been founded specially to report on the Scopes affair. It was an extraordinary but hardly an incomprehensible outburst.

On its first birthday the New Yorker editorialized: "We declared a year ago that it was not the New Yorker's intention to tap the North American steppe region by offering the natives mirrors and colored beads in the form of the recognized brands of hokum": 'The North American steppe region,' 'the Old Lady from Dubuque,' 'the Pickle Princes of Peoria'—such phrases are literary wild oats. The present editors would deplore alike their sound and their sense. Their sense because whereas at the end of its first year the New Yorker announced that its 40,000 circulation was "almost all of it in the city and suburbs," today exactly half its 125,000 readers live outside New York. And their sound, because exuberance is no longer the New Yorker's "line." The brash Menckenians and the aggressively sophisticated Algonquins have been superseded by the timorous and bewildered Thurber. The New Yorker as well as the National City Bank bears the marks of 1929.

The New Yorker's immediate reaction to the market crash was to set a distance between itself and the business community. That week it editorialized: "The collapse of the market, over and above the pain, couldn't help but be amusing. It is amusing to see a fat land quivering in panicky fright. The quake, furthermore, verified our suspicions that our wise and talky friends hadn't known for months what they were talking about when they were discussing stocks." This detachment from "our wise and talky friends" was something new. It grew with the depression. But such protestations should not be taken too seriously. All that had really happened was that the New Yorker's honeymoon with the oligarchy was over and it had begun to look on its consort more critically. But the marriage has not been disolved.

The transition from the self-confident, magisterial satire of the Scopes trial period to the gentle humor of a Thurber, self-confessed ninny and know-nothing, simply reflects a similar change in the position of the ruling class. The present New Yorker formula for pathos and humor is an expression of a deep-rooted uncertainty about itself which this class has come to feel because of its impotence in the late economic crisis.

The clearest way to define the "tone" of the New Yorker of today is to contrast it with the old American Mercury, which in its time had very much the same relation to the intelligentsia. The antithesis holds at almost every point. The Mercury gloried in its lack of inhibitions. Its language was violent, bombastic, direct, impatient of restraint and a stranger to nuance. Its humor was explosive and shrill. Its realism was raw, crude, uncompromisingly frank about sex. The Mercury would print almost anything pour epater le (petit) bourgeois. The New Yorker, on the contrary, is anxious to avoid shocking any one. Its literary style is subtle, oblique, its humor subdued to the point of monotony.

What the New Yorker has done to the realistic tradition of the twenties is especially interesting. Superficially, its fiction remains within the tradition. It is realism with a difference however: deodorized, deloused, reminiscent of William Dean Howells rather than of Dreiser. The sad, deftly unaccented, dullish little tales of Robert M. Coates are the type examples of New Yorker "realism." Coates, John O'Hara, Kay Boyle, and other contributors have developed a pseudo-realism which has all the advantages and none of the drawbacks of the real thing. (In their extra-New Yorker writing, these authors are less inhibited.) The reader, that is to say, enjoys the illusion of "seeing life" without suffering the embarassment of actually doing so. These writers admit the existence of sex, but they are at considerable pains to protect the reader from its grosser aspects. They frequently describe the life of the submerged classes, and always with sensibility. Here, too, they are careful not to shock the bourgeois reader. Poverty is suggested rather than bluntly described, and their underdogs are drawn, not from the proletariat, whose sufferings are meaningful and hence tragic, but rather from the ranks of the declassed. They write of minor actors, of provincials drifting rootless in the jungle of the city, of boxers and alcoholics and prostitutes. From these futile lives they extract a facile pathos. The New Yorker has formularized the pathos as well as the humor of the inadequate. Treated subjectively, inadequacy may be comic. Presented objectively, it yields a mild kind of pathos, verging towards—but skillfully kept just this side of the sentimental.

The New Yorker is the last of the great family journals. Its inhibitions stretch from sex to the class struggle. It can be read aloud in mixed company without calling a blush to the cheek of the most virtuous banker. The subjects of its profiles, especially if they are wealthy and powerful, are treated deferentially. This summer President Gifford of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company was presented to the readers of the New Yorker in three instalments quivering with sympathy. The muck raked up last winter by Congressional investigators is delicately ignored, and Mr. Gifford is depicted as an intelligent, modest, rather pathetic person, distressed by his eminence and anxious only to live democratically among his fellow citizens. In the deodorized pages of the New Yorker, the 1917 revolution becomes "this violent phase of Russian experience," and diabetics are "those dieters who can't abide sugar." The magazine's inhibitions may have a neurotic as well as a social basis. According to Fortune, Harold Ross, who founded the New Yorker and has always dominated its editorial policies, lives in constant terror of earthquakes, crossing streets, and physical assault. His editorial prudishness is legendary. Arno's once-famous Whoops Sisters had to be sobered up because they shocked him. The other editors are also interesting psychoanalytically. One is a hypochondriac, another can't bring himself to open his morning mail, and so on. One editor suffered from amnesia and ulcers of the stomach until his salary was raised. The Freudian approach would also have something to say about Thurber and Sullivan, both of whom find in humor an escape from neurotic symptoms.

Bergson calls laughter "a social gesture." Considered thus, it is a response to the contrast between the comic object and a generally accepted norm. In societies that are flourishing and hence united—such as produced Aristophanes, Moliere, and the other classic humorists—the validity of the social norm is unchallenged. It is enough merely to point out a departure from it to get a humorous effect. Laughter is thus a defense of the social order, like the police force, and humor tends to be satirical. But in decadent societies, when all values are called into question, a more complex procedure is necessary. The New Yorker's humor is a criticism of the social norm as well as of the comic object. Typically, it establishes a relationship between a rational observer and an irrational person or phenomenon—so far the classic formula. But the observer is ineffectual, and the comic object is not only irrational but also overpowering, so that for all his perception, the observer is unable to cope with the object. Thus the humorist also becomes a source of amusement, and humor is drawn as much from the insufficiency of the norm as from its violation.

This is not to say that the one type of humor is, in itself, superior to the other. Each is "right" for its particular stage of social development. That the "prosperity" of the twenties was unhealthy might have been demonstrated by the social historian, quite without benefit of statistics, simply by the inferior quality of Menckenian satire. For this humor was of the "classic" type: aggressive satire based on the social values of the big bourgeoisie. But since this class was economically superfluous, the Menckenian humor had a false base and hence today seems forced and artificial. The New Yorker's humor is superior because it is an accurate expression of a decaying social order.

The object with which the New Yorker humorist so disastrously collides may be almost anything. Common categories are: a personality; The Machine; a series of deplorable but apparently inevitable occurrences; some form of "Theory." Towards these, and indeed all other phenomena the humorist's reaction is a mixture of awe and condescension. He is awed by the vitality of the person, the efficiency of The Machine, the inscrutable hand of Nemesis, and the abstruse complexity of the theory. At the same time, he cannot but feel a certain superiority toward the illogical mental processes of the person, the humdrum, unimaginative practicality of The Machine, the pointlessness of the disasters, and the esoteric pretensions of the theory. Such reactions may be expected of observers who are extremely intelligent but also a bit neurotic. For none of these humorists are precisely Rabelaisian. In fact, Rabelais would probably appeal to them more as a comic theme himself than as a master to be imitated.

The most common of these categories is the first. Two recent successful series belong to it: Clarence Day's Life with Father and Leonard Q. Ross's The Education of Hyman Kaplan. In social background Mr. Day (the elder) and Mr. Kaplan are polar opposites, but temperamentally they are similar: overbearing, quite without doubt or even consciousness of themselves, bursting with will and vitality, and, above all, masterfully, irresistibly unreasonable. Thurber's splendidly vigorous grandfather (who also happens to be violently insane) in My Life and Hard Times is another such creation. Of the three, Thurber's is much the most freely imaginative creation. In general, his treatment of the classic New Yorker comic theme (which he, more than any one else, originated) often transcends realistic observation to reach an absolute, personal fantasy. In my opinion, Thurber is the New Yorker's most important writer, and his My Life and Hard Times (1933) contains the best humor of the entire post-war period.

In the class war the New Yorker is ostentatiously neutral. It makes fun of subway guards and of men-about-town, of dowagers and laundresses, of shop-girls and debutantes. It refuses, officially, to recognize the existence of wars, strikes, and revolution, just as it doesn't mention the more unpleasant diseases or the grosser aspects of sexual passion. Deliberately—for these gentlemen know very well what they are about—its editors confine their attention to trivia. This is not to say they oppose change, since that too would commit them. They affect a gentle bewilderment toward the social system, as if it were some labyrinthine, and potentially dangerous, piece of machinery. With shrewdly calculated vagueness, they pronounce that it is all very complicated, that only experts can understand it, and that they are not, Thank God, experts.

The New Yorker's position in the class war, however, is not so simple as its editors would have us believe. Its neutrality is itself a form of upper class display, since only the economically secure can afford such Jovian aloofness from the common struggle. In times like these there is something monstrously inhuman in the deliberate cultivation of the trivial. "Jeanette MacDonald marries Gene Raymond in a church, of all places. Hay-fever people can have their nostrils ionized. Seventy shop-girls swoon en masse in France. The midsummer ice season starts in the Adirondacks. A new purge in Russia. A Fascist gain in Spain. Will Hays authorizes a six-foot kiss." Only a neurotic, a well-fed neurotic, could thus desensitize himself.

But even the New Yorker cannot pass over certain crying social injustices. Even the New Yorker has its moments—March 13, 1937, and July 10, 1937, to be specific. On the first date it boldly denounced President Roosevelt for his infamous Court Plan, and on the second it gave its support to the newspaper publishers in their conflict with the Newspaper Guild. It is good to know that when the foundations of society are imperilled, the New Yorker may be depended on to quit fooling around and get down to business. Among the thousands of editorials which the New Yorker has printed in its thirteen years of existence, these are unique on several counts. For one thing, they are almost painfully in earnest, with only the most perfunctory touches of humor. For another, they are quite badly written—perhaps because it is hard to maintain the elegant-trifler pose when one's deepest emotions are involved. And for still another, in them the New Yorker, with not a trace of its customary fastidious horror of the banal, bases its argument on the same old slogans already worn threadbare in the Republican press. The Court Plan is an assault on "liberty," and the Newspaper Guild threatens the "freedom of the press."

There are humorous magazines which attempt no more than to be "funny" in a miscellaneous way. Punch and the old Life were such, and so is Judge. There are also those with a consistent class viewpoint, and these are likely to be both more profitable and longer-lived. Such are Punch and the New Yorker. The New Yorker is comparatively infantile, but already it has struck roots deep into the American scene. Punch gives the English ruling class a sense of the continuity of their tradition. The New Yorker gives our ruling class the even more satisfactory sensation of establishing a tradition in a landscape notably barren of such ornaments.

It is worth while spending a few words on the New Yorker's criticism of art and letters as an instance of what might be called the Park Avenue attitude toward the arts. The chief quality of New Yorker criticism is its amiability. Since to Park Avenue, art is important chiefly as a means of killing time, what is required is not critics but tipsters. Park Avenue wants tips on the really amusing books and plays just as it wants tips on the really amusing night clubs. And it wants them delivered as painlessly as possible. So the New Yorker's criticism is, above all, "sprightly." Mr. Robert A. Simon is able to talk about music in the same breezy, casually well-bred accents as the colleague who signs "Foot-Fault" to his comments on tennis. "The Vivaldi concerto had a poetic slow movement, surrounded by a couple of bouncing divisions of a sort which Vivaldi could probably write while you waited." Or: "Mr. Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto … was a five star finale." Or: "Miss Andreva was a snappy Musetta, but she gave in to a temptation to whoop things up, and Puccini's music hits back when it's whooped." (Music criticism also hits back when it's whooped.) The least bad of the critics is Clifton P. Fadiman. But he, too, is a master of the "easy" (to say the least) style. Thus: "… lovely as it is, The Years is just the merest mite dull." Or his summary of Osborn's Freud and Marx: "Mr. Osborn takes the first step toward bringing the boys together." The most amiable of the critics is Lewis Mumford, who "does" art. For catholicity of taste he is second only to the lady who does dresses and hats, and in mastery of the cliche he is her superior. In a single issue last winter, Mr. Mumford (1) called John Singleton Copley "the first great American artist," (2) pointed out "the strength and delicacy of Arnold Friedman's paintings," (3) spoke of Burliuk as "a painter who invests the commonplace with a very personal fantasy," (4) called Karl Hofer "probably the best-rounded German painter of his generation" and found in his work "a mixture of beauty and terror, of grace and agony that makes it curiously representative of his whole generation," (5) saluted John Carroll as "a diabolically good painter" and observed of one of his nudes: "The modelling of the trunk and the beauty of its outline takes the breath away."

The clearest evidence of the class nature of the New Yorker is, of course, its advertising. Its readers are expected to buy Paris gowns, airplanes, vintage wines, movie cameras, Tiffany jewelry, air conditioning, round-the-world trips, et cetera. Interlarded with the advertisements are various "departments," devoted to practical advice on the great problem of upper class life: how to get through the day without dying of boredom. Here the class character of the New Yorker emerges with brutal effect. After reading Mr. Coates' tender little stories, after the drolleries of Thurber or White—so fine and free, so independent of sordid commerce—it is somehow shocking to come upon a two column discussion of imported olive oil. From the cloudland of fantasy one drops abruptly to the dollars-and-cents earth of luxurious living. One lands with a bump. It would almost seem that the people for whom Messers. White and Thurber write must be an altogether different set from those to whom Messers. Saks and Tiffany address their advertisements.

Judging from the New Yorker's "departments," its readers travel a good deal, are fussy about restaurants and clothes, and follow closely the more fashionable sports, namely: golf, polo, football, squash raquets, tennis, yachting, and horse-racing. They take a well-bred interest in books, music, art, the cinema and the theatre. Their standard of living includes custom-made shoes at $50 and boots at $100 (trees: $30), satin curtains at $120 a pair (not including the labor), jaguar hunting in Brazil at $ 1250 per month per person, fireside seats covered in saddle leather ("with hand-colored decorations celebrating the chase") at $45, and visits to Baron Pantz's Austrian castle ("The entrance fee of $1,000 entitles you to go to Mittersill at any time … at a flat rate of $10 a day.")

But even such celestial creatures, like all the rest of us, have their problems. Really quite odd problems. Nature, the incorrigible, is usually involved. Sometimes the question is how to get closer to her. They buy, at $5 each, painted metal trumpet-vine blossoms, which they fill with sweetened water and thus attract humming birds. Or they install beehives ($21 each) in their windows and watch the bees through a glass panel. More often, the problem is how to thwart nature. They solve the dog-vs.-rug problem with Dog Tex, "a pure, almond-scented liquid." To keep from being awakened too early—in the city by street noises; in the country, by starlings—they buy small pink instruments called Flents, "the magical ear stopples." For night motoring, to shut out the glare of approaching headlights, they buy eyeglasses with the upper half smoked. ("Ground to your own prescription and mounted in white gold, they cost from $18 up.") For daytime motoring they have the Sunair Auto Top Co. put sliding roofs on their cars at $250 each. Their women have many special problems, with appropriate solutions. A recent technological advance is the "windshield-wiper" powder compact, which has an arm that automatically wipes clean the mirror when the compact is opened ($6.50 up).

It would be rash to assume that most of the 120,444 people who read the New Yorker every week are plutocratic enough to buy $50 shoes and $120 curtains. A survey of the financial status of the average reader might reveal score interesting things. It is quite possible that most readers of the New Yorker, like most movie-goers, are comparatively humble folk who are willing to pay a small admission fee for a peep into the haut monde. Such people might well enjoy reading tips on expensive living with not the slightest thought of making use of the information. For all one knows, the center of gravity of the New Yorker's circulation may be closer to Lexington Avenue than to Park Avenue. In this country, of all countries, the class war is complicated by the persistence of the old American custom of keeping up with the Joneses.