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Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe
Syosset, New York
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Everyone is reading "50 Shades of Grey."
I'm no "spynik"--someone who is hooked on spy stories, fictional and real. I'm into "Shtick lit."
"Shtick lit" is a writing genre in which the author undertakes an odd or stuntlike project with the intention of writing about the experience. Jerry Seinfeld popularized this literary subgenre with his 1993 book titled, "Seinlanguage." People magazine called it "a flimsy collection of bits." Ray Romano ("Everything and a Kite"), Paul Reiser's book, "Couplehood," and Alan King's 1964 book, "Help! I'm a Prisoner in a Chinese Bakery" could also be labeled "shtick lit."
Let's look at how these men dealt with the following humorous topics:
SEINFELD: clothing
"I had a leather jacket that got ruined in
the rain. Now how does moisture ruin leather? Aren't cows outside a lot of
the time?"
REISER: clothing
"Getting dressed is a fascinating little world
once you're married. Especially for men.
Because upon marriage, you lose the ability
to choose clothing by yourself."
ROMANO: age
"Every age has its anxieties. Who wouldn't
want to be twenty again, right? But if you
think back, you realize that twenty has its
set of problems, too. You still have acne, no
one will go out with you, you drive a truck
for a mattress company and live in your
parents' basement in Queens."
SEINFELD: age
"There definitely seems to be an age gap
in the hiring policy at most movie theaters.
They never hire anyone between the ages
of 15 and 80. So the girl that sells the
tickets, she's 10."
SEINFELD: doctors
People love to recommend their doctor
to you....He's the best. This guy's the best.
There can't be this many "bests." Someone's graduating at the bottom of these classes Where are these doctors?
KING: doctors
"But not all doctors are Schweitzers, Sabins,
and Salks...My brother is a doctor. I wouldn't let him cut my nails. When he was
fourteen, he was still wetting his bed...Last
year he gave me shots for theAsian flu, and
the next day I had Asian flu. He never misses."
KING; lawyers/wills
"Me? I've got a lawyer and a will that runs
nineteen pages. That's five more pages than the Magna Charta, but it's very
important that I cover every eventuality...
What he doesn't know is that I've made
out a new will. I've bequeathed my wife the
key to the safe-deposit box and a Ouija board just in case she has any questions."
ROMANO: mom
"I miss Mom. I miss the worrying, the meals, the Vicks VapoRub. I even miss
the way she never quite learned how to use
the VCR...VCRs were like Kryptonite to my
mother."
SEINFELD: mom
"I came from the kind of family where my
mother kept an extra roll of toilet paper
on the tank in back of the toilet, and it had
a little knit hat with a pom-pom on it.
...The toilet paper had a hat, the dog had a
sweater, and the couch arms and back had
little fabric toupees to protect it."
SEINFELD: beds
"I consider myself a master life efficiency
expert. For example, when I'm making my
bed and I tuck in one side of the sheet, I
stay bent over as I walk to tuck in the other
side. Why stand up and then bend again?
It's a waste of life."
ROMANO: beds
"The only real benefit in getting a smaller
bed is that you get credit for cuddling,
whether intentional or not. You're not
going to get away with that in a big bed. No, no. Once you've gone king,
cuddling requires a conscious effort."
ROMANO: weddings/proposals
"Whenever my wife and I argue about this
subject, she still brings up the fact that I
never told her how good she looked on our
wedding day. That's eleven years ago.
Apparently there's no statue of limitations
on a violation such as that."
KING: weddings/dances
"It [the wedding] was like a three-ring circus. The women danced with the women.
A drunken waiter was dancing with himself.
...Someone's nine-year-old kid who thought
the Mogen David wine was Kool-Aid passed
out on top of the wedding cake.
In the middle of all this pandemonium the band broke into a hora the traditional Jewish folk dance for all festive occasions. What's traditional about it is that the people who are dancing never have the slightest idea what they're doing."
REISER: proposals
"I remember officially proposing. Actually
asking this woman to literally, officially,
marry me. I couldn't get the words out. I
couldn't stop laughing. It felt so dopey. So
cliche. 'Asking for her hand in marriage,' I
felt like I was in some bad Ronald Colman
movie."
KING: father-in-law's blessings
"Getting my father-in-law's blessings to
marry his daughter was like getting the
Governor of Alabama to give his blessing to a Freedom Bus.
"Will you support my daughter in the manner to which she's accustomed?"
"Sure," I replied. "We're moving in with you."
KING: restaurants/eating
"You ought to see what they serve in these
[health-food] places. Nothing is what it's
supposed to be. Wheat-germ burgers,
soyaberry shortcake. They had flowers on
the table. I didn't know if it was a center-
piece or my main dish...In a health-food
restaurant, if you say 'hey' to a waiter, he
brings it"
REISER: cooking/eating
"Then there are things you don't even
realize you ate. You're on the run all day,
you grab what you can, and at the end of
the day you realize--you're a goat. You've
eaten whatever you saw, whenever you saw
it. And somewhere in your belly lie
pathetically odd combinations of foods:
A quarter pound of hummus and some Cracker Jacks. Fifteen pieces of bread and a sour ball....Chicken salad, blueberries, and a Mounds Bar."
SEINFELD: cooking
"I will never understand why they cook on
TV. I can't smell it. Can't eat it. Can't taste
it. The end of the show they hold it up to the camera. 'Well, here it is. You can't have
any. Thanks for watching. Goodbye.'"
ROMANO: cell phone
"I spent a lot of time in my car then. Half
of it was just to use the cell phone. I learned the hard way not even to attempt a
business call from my house if my two-year-old was in the area.
"Yeah, the fifteenth is good for me. I just need to know where do you . . . thiNK
YOU'RE GOING WITH THAT COOKIE!!! PUT
THE COOKIE DOWN! Oh . . not you. Sorry.
Did I scare you? Oh . . . didn't know you
were eating a cookie."
KING: telephones {how they've changed]
"All the prefixes used to have such lovely
sounding names like Evergreen and
Whippoorwill and Forsythia and Magnolia.
Do you know what my prefix is now? 598!.
That's right. I just received a notice that my
new number is 598-6015. I can't even
remember my wife's birthday so how the
hell am I supposed to remember a number
like that?"
SEINFELD: I.R.S./taxes
"Even though I.R.S. kind of sounds like Toys
'R' Us, they're not fun people."
ROMANO: driving
"Where I'm from, New York City, the real
benefit of driving very late at night is that
it's the only time you can find a parking
spot."
SEINFELD: driving
"People will kill each other for a parking
spot in New York because they think, 'If I
don't get this one, I may never get a space.
I'll be searching for months until somebody
goes out to the Hamptons.'"
REISER: driving
"The only time we're nice on the road is if an ambulance has to get through...Then it's a mad rush for the Ambulance Wake.
Everybody wants to get behind that ambulance. 'I saw it first, buddy. I pulled
over first, so I get to go ahead of you--
that's how it works.'"
KING: airlines
"On the ground the airlines are geared to a
maximum efficiency of three people--the
pilot, the co-pilot, and the stewardess. They've got it made. They can always get on the plane. In 10 minutes, the airlines
can load 150 hot meals, 4 tons of luggage,
10 tons of freight, 400 little bottles of booze. No problem. It's all automatic.
But they still haven't figured out how to get
the passengers on board."
ROMANO: conversations on airplanes
"I'm just not a great conversationalist...So
what you have to do is cut off all possible
avenues of communication. Your best bet is
just to walk on the plane wearing headphones, a surgical mask, and looking
through a View-Master. I know that'll work, because at home, it's the way I go to
bed."
KING: traveling with wife
"I didn't know how lucky I was, because he
[agent] never weighed Jeanette's purse. She had enough stuff packed away in there
to open a southeast branch of Sears, Roebuck."
REISER: babies
"I saw a kid who had some little dried-up
food on his face. (Not since birth, just since
lunch, I imagine.) His mother took out a
tissue, SPIT on the tissue, and rubbed it into
the kid's face. I'm not making this up. This
goes on, in communities around the country, on a daily basis."
ROMANO: 2-year-olds
"...I wasn't really that informed about the
two-year-old. Oh, I'd read about them,
and occasionally I'd see documentaries on
the Discovery Channel showing two-year-
olds in the wild, where they belong."
KING: children
"While I'm working years off my life expectancy on Saturdays, what do you think those kids are doing? Well, from
6 A.M. to 8 A.M. they're flipping baseball
cards. From 8 A.M. to 9 A.M. they're watching the movie Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein and the Wolf Man on
television. When I was their age my parents
wouldn't permit me to watch horror movies. My own kids see a double feature
before breakfast...Saturday afternoons are
devoted to physical activity. They stand on
the corner and look up and down the street
for the Good Humor man."
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Marjorie Gottlieb Wolfe is also into
"anecdotal dotage": that advanced age
where all one does is relate stories about
"the good old days."
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