Postscript: Mark Singer 1950 - 2026

Mark Singer (photo by Neilson Barnard)

I see in the Times that Mark Singer has died: “Mark Singer, Longtime Writer for The New Yorker, Dies at 75.” The Times piece rightly says that he “extended the magazine’s franchise of rich reporting and witty prose about offbeat, complicated and quintessentially American characters.” It quotes New Yorker editor David Remnick: “He came out of the tradition of A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell and Calvin Trillin, which is to say he combined meticulous reporting and a very distinctive comic voice, which is extremely rare.” This is well put. 

Singer was also a master of the “Talk of the Town” story. See, for example: 

“Man vs. Mouse” (“He arranged ‘a Maginot Line of glue traps’ and set out a pizza box with a mouse-size hole and, inside, pieces of mozzarella and pepperoni surrounded by glue traps. This yielded maddening footage of Horace entering the pizza box and, moments later, sauntering out”); 

“Sleight of No Hands” [“Somehow—Jay’s biography, though it comes as close as any source to explaining the how of how, still leaves a reader at the intersection of belief and disbelief—he did magic (specialty: cups-and-balls), played several instruments (dulcimer, trumpet, flute), trick-shot with pistols, demonstrated exquisite ball control at skittles, danced the hornpipe on his leather-encased stumps, married four times, and sired fourteen children (proof, as Jay noted in Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, of ‘one fully operative appendage’)”];

“Bank Shot” [“When he arrived at Eyebeam, the immediate challenge was to center the logo of American Eagle Savings Bank on the cover of Theories of Business Behavior, by Joseph William McGuire (formerly in the collection of the Cloud County Junior College Library, of Concordia, Kansas)”];

“All-Nighter” (“Or does it refer to stuff that’s really, really hard to follow, especially when certain brainiacs insist on reading their turgid prose in a monotone that makes us doubt our very existence, because, Jesus, why doesn’t this guy in the gray turtleneck occasionally look up and, you know, smile?”);

“Risky Business” (“ ‘As soon as they started moving the bulls out of the pens into the bucking chutes, I could see Bushwacker go from docile to this’ – he pantomimed a bull pawing the ground – ‘and I thought, This bull knows’ ”).

Singer’s Mr. Personality (1989), one of the most beautiful collections of New Yorker writing ever published, contains twenty-five  of his “Talk” pieces, including such classics as “Yabba-Yabba, Doodle-Doodle” (in which Mr. Blatford memorably says, “You get your change from a change machine, put your dog in the Doggie Washer, do your yabba-yabba, doodle-doodle – you know, whatever you do while you’re waiting in a Laundromat – and then go home with a clean dog”) and “Pigeon Mumblers” (“Some Greenpoint pigeon mumblers who are familiar with Killer’s irascible moods say that if he really put his mind to it, he could probably hatch a baseball”).

In a future post, I’ll consider Singer’s literary legacy in more detail. For now, I just want to pay my respects to him. He's a New Yorker great.