50 Funniest American Writers - James Thurber

Part of today's reading for class was James Thurber's story More Alarms at Night. This story stood out to me for a few reasons. The first, although silly and no where near relevant to the story, was with in the first few lines; to open the story Thurber says that the father "threatened to get Buck." To be honest I'm not really sure when this story was written, but since it takes place in the early nineteen hundreds I am going to assume "getting buck" does not mean the same thing as it does today. In today's terms "getting buck" means that the person is getting "crunk" (AKA extremely drunk, wild, and crazy) according to urban dictionary, and any other 20 year old n America. I have included a link to the song, "get buck in here." I thought that this may give the reader a more complete understating of the word.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x45xic_get-buck-in-here-akon-ft-diddy-luda_music

So, as I read the story I kept waiting for the faster to start going crazing and "raging." But, it wasn't till half way through this short story till I learned that buck was supposed to be a name, not an act of getting "crunk." Once I learned this I had to read the story all over again because I was clearly reading it in the wrong light.

The second reason why I found this particular story intriguing is because I really love pranks. I have always found pranks to be very funny and ever since I was young I was pulling them on people. As a self proclaimed "master of pranks," I must say that this is a pretty good one (at least for its time). Basically, the son pranks the father by running into his room and speaking in nonsense (calling him Buck, when in fact his name is Charlie). The father runs out of the room as to not catch what ever it is that the child must have. Then the son sneaks back into his room as if nothing had happened. Subsequently, the entire family is awoken by the father’s shouts. But, instead of blaming the son, they blame the father. They wrote it off and said that it must have been a nightmare because clearly the son was asleep. The perfect prank always ends with someone else getting blamed for it, but this story goes even further and blames the prankee.

I found this story very witty and funny and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.