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. 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.… (more)