S. J. Perelman (1904–1979)

S.J. Perelman was an American humorist, best known for his short pieces in The New Yorker and for writing two of the best Marx Brothers films. This collection of New Yorker stories is not necessarily best read in large chunks (it's a massive collection), but rather as one takes appetizers. Perelman may have the best vocabulary of any American writer I've ever read. His turns of phrase are often brilliant and made more so by the astonishing range of words with which he turns those phrases. show more The pieces are largely divided into two kinds: those in which an event or a news item or such has caught his attention and he spins off a scenario or readers' theatre script satirizing its foibles, and those in which he recounts adventures from his own life. All of these are wonderfully amusing, but the real laughs I found to reside almost always in his tales of his own experiences. Included is a portion of Westward Ha!, a hilarious tellling of his 'round-the-world trip with Broadway caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, and if the entire 600 pages of this book had been devoted to that trip, I would have been delighted. Also of particular interest are a couple of pieces relating to his friendship with Groucho Marx. It's no wonder that Perelman wrote so well for the Marxes, as his somewhat surreal sense of humor is a great match for theirs. Perelman is for comic writing, as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are for hardboiled stories, one of the great purveyors of a kind of language that doesn't exist anymore except in parody or homage, an ironic, witty, and utterly of-its-time style that defies (for me at least) explanation or precise definition, but which is the soul of American letters in the 1920s and '30s. show less

Westward Ha! has more laughs then there are bike repair shops in Utrecht. Hirschfeld's illustrations only help the situation. As it is said in public school teacher lounges, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree"; my dad was a big fan as well -- to such an extent that, on his death bed, he asked me to read choice selections from the book. Seven days away from leaving this life, when most mortals who have their wits about them are busy telling their beads or ruminating upon on sacred show more texts, he was convulsed with laughter as I read, among other passages from Westward Ha! the following description of one of Perelman's maritime adventures on board the Marine Flyer as it carried Pereman and Hirschfeld across the South China Sea:

"Mr. Fuscher...was espoused to a lady who, to put it mildly, had been richly endowed. Every time she strode on deck in the pitifully brief halter and shorts she affected, eyes popped like champagne corks and strong men sobbed aloud. It did not seem possible that mere wisps of silk could confine such voluptuous charms; in fact, there were those who lived in the hope, that a truant gust of wind might create a sensational diversion. On one occasion, I lashed myself to the brink of nervous collapse reading the same sentence over and over in Motley's "Rise of the Dutch Republic " trying to ignore Mrs. Fuscher as she stood silhouetted against the sun in a diaphanous sports dress. I though it rather poor sportsmanship of Hirschfeld, incidently, to show her a sketch of his representing me as a wolf baying against the moon, when he himself was so patently on the prowl."

At the end of his life my dad had a small library of Judaica in his nursing home room. There was Maimonides and Buber. But there was also Perelman.

"I and Thou" is good. But for my dying father, "Westward Ha!" was better. show less

As Paul Theroux points out in the Introduction, S.J. Perelman "was a cheery soul who, when he flew into one of his exalted rages, seemed to have the gift of tongues". He called his stories "feuilletons". He represented himself as a "victimized clown", a "sort of boulevardier and roue who, at the moment of sexual conquest, is defeated by a wayward bedspring".

Most of this collection of articles appeared in the New Yorker, but the "Hindsight Saga" is published here for the first time. We love show more Perelman for his malicious humor and lunacy. Perelman writes about the real world, but he looks for and finds the bizarre. You can find here the soul of the man invited to Hollywood to write jokes for the Marx Brothers. He had a reputation among devoted friends for complicated orchestrations of fiascos.

Perelman died in 1979, at 74, perhaps the last of the writers capable of writing for the highest common denominators among the "booboisie". Few writers can insert "Bowditch", "quahogs", "shagreen", "nainsook", "oppidan", or the verb "swan" into a yarn about a jaunt around his living room. show less

Let me try to get it across to you how much I like S.J. Perelman. Imagine me screaming in your ear, "S.J. Perelman blows my friggin' mind, man! Can you dig it? My friggin'... mind... is... blown!"

Imagine me doing it until your ear hurts. That I would go through the trouble of alienating you just to express my love for. S.J. Perelman should give you an idea of my level of devotion. His cliché twisting prose is an endless pleasure for me, his light, almost fanciful humor and outlook like a show more separate world I can entire at my leisure. This out-of-print collection is as good as any other, since the basic idea is to just read as much as possible.

(This review originally appeared on zombieunderground.net) show less