Ian Frazier The New Yorker 31 October 2016
As you read, use the right hand column to explain HOW the author creates humor. WHAT does he do? I should see annotations next to each paragraph. When you are done, answer the three questions at the end of the text.
I live in what my wife and I like to think of as a safe neighborhood. Recently, however, at a house just up the street, I have noticed disturbing evidence of possible criminal activity, or, at the very least, a violation of local zoning laws. What stopped me short one morning as I was walking our dog was the sight of a “human” corpse smashed up against the front of this house. I put the word in quotation marks because I’m not quite sure to what category the poor dead creature belongs.
It was as flat as a pancake and had evidently hit the house at a high rate of speed. To me, it appeared to be a witch. Among the seasonal decorations at the house—a plastic pumpkin, a sheaf of Indian corn, a silhouette of a black cat arching its back—this grisly, flattened body, with a witch’s hat still in place and a broom also stuck to the siding, sent a shudder of revulsion mixed with pity down my spine. One could picture the accident all too clearly. A young witch, hardly more than a child, is flying too fast on her broom, then:crash!The little arms outstretched on either side, the green fingers spread in a hopeless last-minute attempt to soften the impact, were enough to break your heart.
The negligence of the homeowner was all the more shocking because he (or she) happened to have a cemetery in the front yard. Small, gray, plastic tombstones announced that Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man were all interred there. Surely it would not be too much to hope that the unlucky little witch be given a decent burial as well, even if she was not a celebrity.
One of the mourners who was visiting the cemetery, a lanky young fellow who wore a hockey mask and carried a chainsaw, stood unmoving, as if in shock, beside the Wolf Man’s grave. “Did you know him?” I asked quietly. The grief-stricken fellow did not reply.
A troubling detail about the grave of Dracula caught my eye. It was a skeletal arm reaching out of the well-manicured lawn. If Dracula had in fact been buried alive, as the skeleton arm seemed to suggest, that made a certain amount of unfortunate sense; when you spend your days lying in a coffin, you do run the risk of this kind of mixup. But how did no one see the arm waving in the air, after it had laboriously burst through the sod? And why was it ignored, waving and waving, ever more slowly, until death finally arrived, blessedly, for the supposedly deathless vampire? Rigor mortis then set in, followed by weeks and months of rot and decay and scavenging by local animals, until the bones of the arm were all that remained. What kind of clueless homeowners could fail to notice such a hideous process taking place on their own front lawn?
Enough was enough. I walked to the front door and rang the bell. A handsome, smiling couple in late middle age answered. We got to talking. And that, in short, is how I happened to run for and be elected to the Parsippany school board.
If the story had ended there, all would have been well. But, sadly, a sequel occurred to darken that happy outcome. It started out quite innocently. As the school-board president, I proposed a new policy mandating that only healthy snacks be given to trick-or-treaters. The ordinance was duly voted upon and passed, and I offered to keep an eye open for any violators. Going around the neighborhood and looking in windows, I noticed that the Hampst family seemed to have some snack-size boxes of Milk Duds ready in a wooden salad bowl by the door. I went around to the back and met Mr. and Mrs. Hampst coming in from the garage. I told them, very politely, that the treats I had observed in their front hall were not allowed. Overreacting, Mr. Hampst began to shout and turn red in the face. In a matter of seconds, he had a heart attack and dropped dead.
Of course I felt terrible. I thought that the very least I could do was offer to defray some of the funeral costs, and suggested to my helpful neighbors with the front-yard cemetery that we give Mr. Hampst a plot there. They proceeded to inform me thatit was not a real cemetery(italics mine). Now, I had wondered why the mourner with the chainsaw remained in the exact same position for hours and even weeks without leaving for food and other necessities, but I had not wanted to pry, and my neighbors did not go out of their way to correct any mistaken impression I might have had.
I’m sure there’s a lesson somewhere in all this. Building community takes patience, time, and (sometimes) a regrettable loss of life. But we also have a double standard. The fact remains that a long-dead, decaying young witch is still plastered against my neighbors’ house. Let’s try a little thought experiment:
Would the corpse of a full-grown warlock, a male individual with some power and influence, be subjected to such indignity if he happened to be flying on a much larger broom and ended up smashing into the wall of someone’s house? I think we can all agree that the answer is obvious.♦
Describe the order of the essay. What sort of movement has the author created? Why this movement?
What assumptions does the author make about his or her audience? How do you know?
Where does this land on the humor-satire spectrum?