His Interview, and Welcome to It

[Nobert]

I had only seen a two-minute clip of this before, but someone on YouTube seems to have unearthed most or all of this episode of (I think) Alistair Cooke's Omnibus.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Great stuff! Quite a few "Omnibus" segments were edited down into 16mm prints for classroom use, which seems to be the story with this particular print.

Thurber is one of those writers who people just don't think about much anymore, which is too bad, because he offers tremendous insight into the desperate fragility of the urban white-collar male psyche in the Era. And some of his stuff is still laugh-out-loud funny if you get what he's doing. My own favorite is the New Yorker piece about a nebbishy little office worker who fantasises about murdering a co-worker who drives him to distraction by littering her speech with catchphrases appropriated from Red Barber's baseball broadcasts:

Sitting in his apartment, drinking a glass of milk, Mr. Martin reviewed his case against Mrs. Ulgine Barrows, as he had every night for seven nights. He began at the beginning. Her quacking voice and braying laugh had first profaned the halls of F & S on March 7, 1941 (Mr. Martin had a head for dates). Old Roberts, the personnel chief, had introduced her as the newly appointed special adviser to the president of the firm, Mr. Fitweiler. The woman had appalled Mr. Martin instantly, but he hadn’t shown it. He had given her his dry hand, a look of studious concentration, and a faint smile.”Well,” she had said, looking at the papers on his desk, “are you lifting the oxcart out of the ditch?” As Mr. Martin recalled that moment, over his milk, he squirmed slightly. He must keep his mind on her crimes as a special adviser, not on her peccadillos as a personality. This he found difficult to do, in spite of entering an objection and sustaining it. The faults of the woman as a woman kept chattering on in his mind like an unruly witness. She had, for almost two years now, baited him. In the halls, in the elevator, even in his own office, into which she romped now and then like a circus horse, she was constantly shouting these silly questions at him.”Are you lifting the oxcart out of the ditch? Are you tearing up the pea patch? Are you hollering down the rain barrel? Are you scraping around the bottom of the pickle barrel? Are you sitting in the catbird seat?”

 

[Nobert]

Reading The Catbird Seat in tenth-grade English class was one of the few valuable take-aways I got from the public school system.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Lizzie, I just read through his collection Thurber on Crime, and "Catbird Seat" is one of the selections. I particularly like Martin's line late in the story: "I'll be coked to the gills when I bump that old buzzard [their supervisor] off."

I also liked his children's book, The 13 Clocks. It contains the nightmarish creature called the Todal, "sent by the Devil to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should"!

I'd never seen what Thurber really looked like. I keep picturing him as William Windom. . . .

 

[Nobert]

I also liked his children's book, The 13 Clocks. It contains the nightmarish creature called the Todal, "sent by the Devil to punish evildoers for having done less evil than they should"!

I'd never seen what Thurber really looked like. I keep picturing him as William Windom. . . .

"He'll slit you from your guggle to your zatch."
My mother told me I used to find this hilarious as a wee tot, though I have no memory of it, or of the story at all until I read it as an adult (or as close as I come to qualifying). Many of the nonsense words in that book, like 'Todal' were actually cyphers used when Thurber was a code clerk during the first world war.

He also once remarked something like, 'Everyone expects me to look like the men I draw, bald, pudgy and 5'3".'