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He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: "After dinner, the men moved into the living room," and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all night. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
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The Years with Ross (Little Brown & Co, 1957, pg.267)
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Variant: From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. “After dinner, the men moved into the living room.” I explained to the professor that this was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.
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Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988); Harold Ross was the editor of The New Yorker from its inception until 1951, and well-known for the overuse of commas

 

James Thurber

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I tour the South, though, I do. I love touring the South. Some people up North are afraid of the South, it's weird. I'll do a show in, like, Alabama. I'll tell someone I did a show in Alabama and they'll be like, "Oh my God! What was that like?" Oh, you know, chairs, a microphone. Oh, I'm sorry, I know what you're looking for. I'll tell you what it was like. Well, I flew into Birmingham. The Imperial Wizard from the Klan picked me up at the airport. Rode to the club on the back of an old mule. Tried to get a joke out over the shouts of "jewboy go home." At the end of the night I go "Where's my check?" They go, "You're not gettin' a check. You're gettin' this bag of porkrinds." Is that the answer you were looking for, you narrow-minded fake-liberal f**k?

 

Todd Barry

 

I wrote a song called "Father & Son" about the son running off to do his own thing. Now the story is about my son coming back and bringing a guitar into the house. A couple of years ago, one morning after prayers, his guitar was lying around. I picked it up and my fingers knew exactly where to go. I'd written some words and when I put them to music, it moved me and I realized I could have another job to do. Things just grew from there.

 

Cat Stevens

 

Some friends of mine asked me if I wanted to go to a strip club, and I didn't...want to go. But I ended up going, 'cause—back me up on this, fellas—once you've seen one woman naked, you...pretty much wanna see the rest of 'em naked. It can be an old biker chick, you know they're gonna hang down to here. "Wanna see my titties!?" "Yeah, I do!" [cringes] "All right, that's enough, roll 'em back up, sweetheart!" [imitates her rolling her breasts back up and sealing them in place.] The things that make you go [shudders]

 

Ron White

 

"Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurantist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains to puree of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!"
Auditorium monitors moved in, truncheons ready to club down anyone foolish enough to try jumping the lecture platform; and finally there was relative silence. And I heard scattered voices screaming from the back of the room, "Who? And I said, "Yes. Who!"

 

Harlan Ellison

 

"There isn't any room," said Joshua. "You travel back along the line of time and you don't find the past, but another world, another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same, you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it wouldn't be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at all, but another second, a totally separate sector of time. We live in the same second all the time. We move along within the bracket of that second, that tiny bit of time that has been allotted to our particular world."

 

Clifford D. Simak