First off, the confusion later down the road by using my code below isn't remotely close to being worth saving a few keystrokes, but to answer your question, you can use a typeglob, and wrap the call within an anonymous sub. Note how I pass in the parameters (@_) through the anonysub and directly into the original call:

use warnings;
use strict;

use Time::Piece;

*st = sub { Time::Piece->strptime(@_) };

st("Sunday 3rd Nov, 1943", "%A %drd %b, %Y",);
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