One of the pleasures of a New Yorker subscription is reading the brilliant if alarmingly regular obituaries, composed by a staff writer, of a recently deceased colleague at the magazine. It's not for nothing that these people have found their way into a certain line of work. The most recent specimen, here, concerns John Bennet, an editor unknown to the public, who is eulogized by quite a well-known writer, Nick Paumgarten. The piece enumerates some "Bennetisms," including:
A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that's open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.
If you don't like something I write, remember: there's no one walking behind me! Paumgarten says he has on the wall of his office a draft of a long "Profile" he'd written for the magazine. It had been edited by Bennet, and somewhere around the middle several consecutive paragraphs, spreading across a few pages, were X'd out. In the margin, Bennet had chicken-scratched the justification for this long excision: "Blah, blah, blah." If you are at all inclined, I recommend the whole thing—it's not long (no blah, blah, blah).
Here is another recent contribution to the genre, Ian Frazier's obituary of Martin Baron, a fact checker at the magazine for 35 years. Quoted snippets cannot convey its excellence, which has something to do with a modulated and understated tone that creates an overall effect well beyond the sum of things explicitly stated. Apparently not the easiest fellow to know too well, though esteemed by Frazier, Baron had become a superannuated figure, awaiting his end in an apartment in the Bronx where he smoked Marlboros out of the presence of home healthcare workers and, with politeness almost awkward in its formality, conversed with an old colleague who had come for a last visit.
The video above is of comedian Dina Hashem. I think she's hilarious, often in a similarly understated way. The bit in this routine concerning the former boyfriend with an unusual sexual proclivity seems to relate subterraneanly to the recent handiwork of some state legislatures.
Boyfriend: I like sex with pregnant women.
Hashem: I'll gain a few pounds for you, but that's as far as it goes.
Boyfriend: But it would turn me on to feel a life within you.
Hashem [deadpan but exasperated, indicating her body with hand gestures]: I'm alive.
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