S. J. PerelmanCritiques

Stephen Leacock having stopped writing humour, Mr. Perelman stepped up to be the most celebrated American Humourist of his day. e was often amusing, and sometimes quite funny. this is the efficient way to absorb what you will of his scope, talents, and ambitions.½

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. 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.

2021

I would have given it 0 stars if I could.

Master of the wisecrack, but not as funny as Richard Armour or as penetrating as James Thurber. So, it is in the mildly amusing pile.½

I hoped for a few laughs. I found there were few of them in this collection of short pieces. Perelman was popular in his day, and apparently a wisecracker, like Groucho Marx. He had only volume as opposed to wit to recommend him.

Perelman's wry comments on re-reading Tarzan after many years. Mildly amusing at best.

If you like Perelman, you'll like this book.

I read just about every humorous city-person-buys-farm memoir I come across (and there's a lot of them) but this one was the biggest disappointment since The Egg and I. The writing style (non-stop high-octane early 20th-century hyperbole) is grating after the first few chapters. The joke about giving his wife a shiner was hard to get past. But when he put the same battered spouse in blackface? I was done.

The Marx Brothers stow away on an ocean liner and meet some gangsters.

2/4 (Indifferent).

Mostly boring. There are some good bits, but they're not good enough to make it worth sitting through.½

2.5 stars for the text, that has dated quite a bit in references, but another half star for the splendid Hirschfeld illustrations, which have not.

A more apt title would be Around the World in 80 Shopping Sprees, since this is not a tale of being stranded, but episodes in a round the world tour, where an inordinate amount of acquisition seems to occur.

Perelman stood out among the popular American humorists if the first half of the 20th century (Benchley, Thurber, Chappell, Ford) for his vocabulary. The humor was broad and standard. A common trope was to describe himself in the most excellent terms, with the goal of conveying just the opposite image. "Under a brow purer than that of Michelanglo's David, capped by a handful of sparse and greasy hairs, brooded a pair of fiery orbs, glittering like zircons behind ten-cent-store spectacles." A sentence such as "Weary of pub-crawling and eager to recapture the zest of courtship, [my wife and I] stayed home to leaf over our library of bills, many of them first editions" would not have been out of place in Benchley. But only Perelman would write a sentence like "This edifying sight it should be noted, was shown us as an example of Yankee prodigality and waste; our cicerone, a Dutch subaltern, underscored it with footnotes on our dollar diplomacy and pharisaism distilled of purest snake venom."

Phlegmatic, punctual Englishman Phileas Fogg believes in progress, science, and intellectual deduction. When a member of the Reform Club challenges him on the impossibility of completing a round-the-world tour in eighty days, he wagers his entire fortune to prove that he can do it. He is accompanied by his valet Passepartout, and followed by Mr. Fix, a detective who believes he is a notorious bank robber.

I remember borrowing this from my hometown library when I was in junior high.

The man was thought funny in his day, but tastes have greatly changed, and Perelman hasn't held up well.½

Collection of short humor pieces previously-printed in The New Yorker and Redbook. Eudora Welty, the New York Times book reviewer, declared Perelman a "national treasure": The only writer who can save Parody.

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 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.½

316. Crazy Like a Fox, by S. J. Perelman (read 23 Mar 1947) When I finished this book on Mar 23, 1947, I said: "Finished Crazy Like a Fox. Perelman is funny."

Just a little too dated to resonate much these days, but I'm sure that folks back then loved these missives. I couldn't really make it far, since Perelman's method gets a bit old quickly.

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 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.

Anthology of autobiographical essay accounts of a family trip around a world of Perelman's own, reprinted from "Holiday" magazine. Includes a cello, wife and two children, dementia praecox, and cartoon illustrations by Hirschfeld.

Picked this up in an attempt to become witty. While the author is certainly sesquipedalian, I did not find this an entirely funny or even sybaritic experience.

Such is the outrageous genius of this that It is vain to call any particular work, or group of works, "The Best of . . ." It's a bit like sayinh which is your favourite child, or your most spectacular kiss, or your most memorable orgasm. I'll probably gave away my copy of this volume simply to share the love -- not that I don't have plenty more samples of his work in my more-or-less permanent collection. Included in this volume are "Is there an osteosynchrondroiticain in the house?", "Frou-frou,or Vertigo revisited", and the delirious "Scenario" with the memorably incomprehensible lines, "Greater love hath Onan", and "I am Yankel Patchouli, a solicitor. Here is my card and a report of my recent urinalysis."

I am hardly surprised that there has been heretofore, no record for this on LT. In no particular order . . . The workmwas published anonymously. It is extremely rare. It is in fact, so hard to find that I suspect an owner might niot wish to advertise the fact. I recall with indignation that the University of Illinois's copy was stolen decades ago, thus depriiving many of a good read. Anyway, this book is absolutely sui generis, though the publisher certainly gave the public fair warning: the binding is a truly loathesome pinkish-purple, embossed with hearts and flowers (no kidding). The text is a maddening highball of surrealism and parody on sentimental fiction, what I used to say "servant girl" stuff, when I was less sensitive than I am now, if such a thing can be imagined. Not surprisingly, the incomparable Groucho gave the best capsule review, and who am I to ignore it? Something to the effect of "From the moment I picked up your book till I laid it down I was convulsed with laughterwith laughter. Some day I intend to read it." Good luck to any who try.

Back when I was trying hard to be cultured, I picked up this book. I've read a lot of the stories, but I don't think I'll ever finish it, so it'll remain in the skimmed/unfinished collection. It's certainly sesquipedalian but most of the cultural allusions go over my head or just don't amuse me.

Really enjoyed these old essays from the New Yorker (mostly, I think). Lots about talkies and going to the movies in the 20s in Providence, R.I. Perelman is hilariously and manages to use vocabulary words I don't know in almost every essay, a quality I appreciate in a writer. The title is never explained or even alluded to. If Perelman can see how far the atrophy has spread I'll bet he's spinning in his grave. But maybe I'm confusing atrophy with apathy? Oh wait, they aren't that different are they?½