S.J. Perelman

Sidney Joseph Perelman (1 February 1904 – 17 October 1979) was an American humorist whose prose style — a dazzling, allusive, pun-crammed, syntactically extravagant confection of highbrow vocabulary and lowbrow subject matter — was the most distinctive and the most imitated comic voice in mid-twentieth-century American writing. For over forty years he published comic essays, sketches, and feuilletons in The New Yorker that are among the funniest things written in English.

Style

Perelman’s style is his substance. His comic method involves taking a banal situation — reading a magazine advertisement, visiting a dentist, dealing with a plumber — and describing it in prose so elaborately overwrought, so densely packed with literary allusion, slang, malapropism, and wordplay, that the gap between style and subject becomes itself the joke. A typical Perelman sentence might yoke together a reference to Proust, a Yiddish idiom, a technical term from embalming, and a pun on a brand name, all delivered with the syntactical precision of a Swiss watchmaker.

He was sometimes compared to James Joyce for his verbal inventiveness, though the comparison flatters both writers for different reasons. Perelman’s genius was for the comic non sequitur, the unexpected collision of registers, and the sustained parody of every variety of American prose — advertising copy, movie dialogue, academic jargon, and the breathless prose of women’s magazines.

Early Career and the Marx Brothers

Perelman was born in Brooklyn, raised in Providence, Rhode Island, and educated at Brown University, where he edited the college humour magazine, the Brown Jug. His first book, Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge (1929), caught the attention of Groucho Marx, who hired Perelman to write two Marx Brothers films: Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932).

The collaboration was not happy — Perelman and Groucho disliked each other, and Perelman later claimed that the Marx Brothers ruined his material by improvising — but the films are classics of American comedy, and Perelman’s verbal wit is audible in their dialogue.

The New Yorker

Perelman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1931 and published there regularly until his death. His pieces — typically 1,500–2,000 words — are impossible to categorise. They are not stories, not essays, not reviews, not sketches, but a unique genre that Perelman essentially invented: the comic feuilleton, in which a first-person narrator (transparently Perelman himself) encounters some absurdity of modern life and responds to it with a prose style of baroque exuberance.

His collections include Strictly from Hunger (1937), Crazy Like a Fox (1944), Westward Ha! (1948, an account of a trip around the world), The Road to Miltown (1957), The Rising Gorge (1961), and The Most of S.J. Perelman (1958), the standard one-volume selection.

Screenwriting

Beyond the Marx Brothers, Perelman co-wrote the screenplay for Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. He also wrote the stage play One Touch of Venus (1943, with Ogden Nash), a Broadway hit.

Travel Writing

Perelman was a compulsive traveller, and his travel books — Westward Ha! (1948) and The Swiss Family Perelman (1950) — apply his comic style to the irritations and absurdities of global travel. They are among his most accessible and entertaining works.

Critical Standing

Perelman’s reputation has always been higher among writers than among the general public. His admirers include Woody Allen, who acknowledged him as a major influence, and every subsequent American comic essayist owes him something. His weaknesses are the weaknesses of his method: the relentless verbal display can become exhausting, and his pieces, though individually brilliant, tend to blur together when read in quantity.

But at his best — in the classic New Yorker pieces, in the Marx Brothers scripts, in the travel books — he is unsurpassed as a comic stylist. No one has ever used the English language with more inventive hilarity.

Collecting Perelman

Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge (1929, Horace Liveright) in first edition is the primary Perelman collectible — scarce and valuable. Crazy Like a Fox (1944) and The Most of S.J. Perelman (1958) in first editions are also collected. Perelman published prolifically and his later collections are readily available.