Author(s): David Remnick

Gifts & Humour

When Harold Ross founded "The New Yorker" in 1925, he called it a "comic weekly." And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder's description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists in the modern era--among them Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Groucho Marx, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Calvin Trillin, Garrison Keillor, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, Jr., Steve Martin, and Christopher Buckley. "Fierce Pajamas" is a treasury of laughter from the magazine W. H. Auden called the "best comic magazine in existence."