Reported Problems With Santa's New Tesla Sleigh

As many of my readers know, I occasionally send out the full text of a brand-new humor piece I’ve written for The New Yorker. Today (Christmas!) is one of those days. Read it below if you don’t have a subscription, or give it a click online! If you’ve already read it, scroll down for some “Behind the Writing.”

Reported Problems With Santa's New Tesla Sleigh

Facial recognition for sleigh ignition is unable to recognize Santa consistently through beard and hat.

Range is a little less than four hundred miles. Nearest village to the North Pole is about eight hundred miles away.

“Frunk” full of presents keeps catching fire.

Reindeer have begun to protest what they believe to be unlawful termination. Santa disagrees—insists that he doesn’t “need those weird little horses anymore.”

Rudolph is suing for I.P.—believes red-nose technology was plagiarized.

Mrs. Claus has surprisingly widespread investments in fossil-fuel companies, and keeps trying to sabotage the Tesla sleigh.

Santa dangerously distracted by sleigh’s touch-screen gaming console.

Sleigh auto-parks while Santa is inside each house putting presents under the tree. When he exits via the chimney, he has no idea where the sleigh is.

Self-driving system keeps trying to take Santa’s sleigh on the highway.

Internal sleigh navigation won’t synch with the “naughty” or “nice” lists.

Santa inexplicably builds tunnel for sleigh, claiming “tunnels are faster than the air.”

Tunnel collapses. Santa blames “the libs.”

Elves assigned to sleigh repair report inhumane working conditions, vote to unionize. Santa declares, “I’ll just fucking do it myself,” and fires entire staff.

Santa unable to “just fucking do it” himself. Attempts to rehire recently fired elves.

Sleigh too tall, sensors unable to recognize elves or children. Sleigh is recalled owing to safety concerns.

Santa is forced to liquidate most North Pole assets to pay for updated sleigh model.

A frustrated Santa shouts, “Merry Christmas to only some of you!” as sleigh flies across the sky. Christmas stock plummets to all-time low.

Someone impersonates Santa’s sleigh on Twitter and convinces millions of people that Christmas has been cancelled.

Charging station at North Pole far too cold to function—sleigh unable to start. Santa’s mittens prevent use of touch screen, V.R. reins, and door handles.

Sleigh just exploded. ♦

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Behind the Writing

Merry Christmas and happy final night of Hanukkah, to those who celebrate!

The inspiration for this piece is (probably) obvious, but the timing seems more apt than usual. Tesla has faced some tough consumer reports reliability rankings this month, amidst multiple investigations into crashes caused by the company’s driver assistance systems and automated driving systems. And none of this has been helped by a rogue CEO who seems intent on tanking stock prices.

With Christmas approaching (and here, today!), I began to think about heightened forms of Tesla’s potential failures—and I landed on Santa’s sleigh. Once I clicked into the fun parallel of “Santa as brazen CEO,” I had all the fuel I needed—and each beat of this piece fell neatly into place like a set of dominoes.

To get overly granular (enjoy, or skip!), my only real literary concern with this piece was with the tense of the final joke:

The entire piece is in present tense, until “Sleigh just exploded,” which takes us to past tense for the first and only time. There is an implication that the action is present perfect—as in, if the sleigh just exploded, then it is still exploding/on fire. But that’s not explicit. So we get present, present, happening, happening, is, is, and then “just [verb]-ed.” This was, in part, because I wanted the final line to feel jarring—to give a firm sense that the piece is now over—and also to help the final joke hit harder. But I think, in many ways, this wording isn’t traditionally “correct” use of tense. But who cares about correct tense? I want correct feeling. And if taken literally, this change implies that the person writing this list has suddenly experienced the end of their list-writing—and that there is no longer anything to write down, because, just now, the sleigh has ceased to be.

Hope you enjoyed an incredibly detailed look into my thoughts behind three measly words.

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That’s all for today—thanks, as always, for reading and supporting this newsletter. Hope you get to spend some time with loved ones today, or at least very soon.

See you Wednesday!