The Most of S.J. Perelman was published by Simon & Schuster in 1958, a comprehensive (over 600 pages) selection from Perelman’s first three decades as America’s foremost literary humorist. The collection draws from his New Yorker pieces (where he published for over forty years), his books, and his screenplays (he wrote for the Marx Brothers, including Monkey Business and Horse Feathers).
Perelman’s prose is unique in American letters: a style so elaborate, so densely allusive, and so syntactically inventive that it constitutes a one-man literary tradition. His method is to begin with some mundane provocation (an advertisement, a travel brochure, a Hollywood press release, a self-help manual) and then construct around it a verbal edifice of such extravagant absurdity that the original object is transformed beyond recognition.
A typical piece might begin: “I am not a man who is easily daunted. When, at the age of forty-seven, I discovered that the elasticity had gone from my suspenders and from my prose style simultaneously, I did not fling myself from the Chrysler Building.” The humor lies not in the joke (which barely exists) but in the prose — in the collision of registers (the philosophical and the sartorial), the precision of diction (no word could be replaced without diminishing the sentence), and the personality of the narrator (vain, self-aware, defeated, defiant).
Perelman influenced Woody Allen, Thomas Pynchon, and every writer who has attempted to make the English language funny through elaboration rather than simplification.
Collecting The Most of S.J. Perelman
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1958): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- Without jacket: $5–$12