Fitzgerald wrote "The Camel's Back" in one sitting. One. He banged it out in a single evening, sold it to The Saturday Evening Post, and used the money to fund his lifestyle of champagne and questionable decisions. And honestly? You can feel that reckless energy in every page. This isn't careful Fitzgerald. This isn't Gatsby-Fitzgerald with the green light and the moral decay. This is Fitzgerald at a party, three drinks in, telling you the funniest thing that happened last weekend.
I finished this during a Sunday morning walk along the lakefront with Denise. She had her own earbuds in - some true crime thing she's been devouring - and I was just grinning to myself like an idiot for an hour. She asked me what was so funny and I tried to explain the premise: a man named Perry Parkhurst, freshly rejected by his fiancée Betty Medill, gets drunk, rents the back half of a camel costume, and crashes a high-society party. The look she gave me suggested she'd made the better podcast choice.
A Costume Party as Social Autopsy
But here's the thing - and let's talk about what the author is really saying - this isn't just slapstick. It's Fitzgerald doing what Fitzgerald always does: using the ridiculous excess of the wealthy to expose how hollow their rituals are. Perry's entire crisis is that Betty won't marry him because he isn't "serious" enough. So what does he do? He literally becomes the back end of a camel. The satire writes itself. Fitzgerald doesn't have to underline it. The absurdity of the costume mirrors the absurdity of the social expectations these characters are drowning in. My students would hate this. I love it.
The story moves fast - it's barely over an hour - and it has that fizzy, champagne-bubble quality that Fitzgerald's lighter work carries. There's a wedding that may or may not be legal, a taxi driver who gets recruited as the front half of the camel, and a scene where Perry tries to maintain his dignity while literally folded in half inside a rented animal suit. It's the Jazz Age distilled into a shot glass.
Michael Scott and the Art of Not Overdoing It
Michael Scott's narration here is smart in a way that matters: he doesn't oversell it. A lesser narrator would've gone full vaudeville with this material - big voices, mugging for laughs, turning every punchline into a cymbal crash. Scott keeps it warm and measured, letting Fitzgerald's own timing do the heavy lifting. His Perry sounds appropriately exasperated - a young man who knows he's being an idiot but can't stop himself. And there's a subtle shift when he voices Betty Medill, not a cartoonish female impression but just enough change in register that you catch the haughtiness, the way she holds her chin up even in dialogue.
The narrator understands that pause is punctuation. There's a moment near the party scene where the absurdity starts to pile up - the camel, the mistaken identities, the alcohol-fueled logic - and Scott gives each beat just enough air to land before the next one arrives. At 1.0x speed (the only civilized option, I maintain), the pacing feels exactly right. The prose deserves to be savored, even when the prose is describing a man sweating inside a camel.
If I'm being honest, there's not a lot of range demanded here. It's a short piece, a handful of characters, and the emotional spectrum runs from "mildly embarrassed" to "chaotically embarrassed." Scott handles it well, but this isn't the kind of performance that makes you forget you're listening to a narrator. It's clean, professional, and appropriate. That's enough for sixty-five minutes.
Who Gets an Invitation to This Party
If you loved Gatsby and want to see Fitzgerald in a looser, goofier mode - like catching your favorite serious actor in a comedy - this is worth your time. It's also a perfect entry point if you've been intimidated by Fitzgerald. Nobody's intimidated by a camel costume.
Skip it if you're looking for depth. This is champagne, not bourbon. It goes down easy and doesn't linger the way "Babylon Revisited" or "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" might. And at just over an hour, it's barely a commitment - more of a palate cleanser between bigger listens.
Worth pausing the faculty meeting for? Absolutely. But maybe not worth burning a full credit on when it's this short. Check your library app first. Though I'll warn you - I went down a rabbit hole of short fiction recommendations after this one and ended up with Ten Tiny Breaths queued up next, which is about as far from Jazz Age champagne as you can get, but sometimes that whiplash is exactly what a Sunday afternoon calls for.
The Annotation in the Margin
This is why we still read the classics - not because they're all heavy and important, but because sometimes a genius writer just wanted to make you laugh. Fitzgerald wrote this for money and fun. A hundred years later, it still delivers on both counts. The camel suit fits better than you'd expect.
