This book includes many of the greatest hits from 1930 to 1958--available only in this edition--by the devastatingly witty Perelman, the leading figure of The New Yorker magazine's golden age of humor and one of the most popular American humorists ever. In these hilarious pieces, the charmingly cranky Perelman turns his scathing attention to books, movies, New York socialites, the newspaper business, country life, travel, Hollywood, the publishing industry, and, last but not least, himself. His self-portrait: "Under a forehead roughly comparable to . . . Piltdown Man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and concupiscence. . . . Before they made S. J. Perelman, they broke the mold." Sophisticated and supremely mischievous, Perelman is an acrobat of language who turns a phrase and then, before the reader has time to finish admiring his agility, turns it again.
Sidney Joseph Perelman, almost always known as S. J. Perelman, was a Jewish-American humorist, author, and screenwriter. He is best known for his humorous short pieces written over many years for The New Yorker. He also wrote for several other magazines, as well as books, scripts, and screenplays.
One of the wittiest writers of the twentieth century and a stylist without equal. The pieces reprinted from The Road to Miltown, especially the 'Cloudland Revisited' sequence, are the sharpest. Re-reading them, you marvel at their simplicity. The author sits down to watch a series of films he loved as a youth and summarises the plots. Simply that. But Perelman’s summaries contain more witty barbs than some comedians get through in a lifetime.
'The leitmotiv of Way Down East, like that of so many early film melodramas, was innocence betrayed, virtue - doggedly sullied through ten reels - riding triumphant and kneeing its traducer into the groin.'
'When Thomas Meighan's face, already icy to begin with, froze, it looked like Christmas at Crawford Notch.'
'Then she too weakens, for, as the subtitle puts it, "You may resist hunger, you may resist cold, but the fear of the unseen can break the strongest will." The unseen in this case takes the form of a moth-eaten cheetah rented from Charlie Gay's lion farm in El Monte.'
Novels scarcely fare better, such as E.M. Hull’s The Sheik:
‘The description of the desert corsair, though, as he takes inventory of his booty, attains a lyrical pitch current fiction has not surpassed: “It was the handsomest and cruellest fact that she had ever seen. Her gaze was drawn instinctively to his. He was looking at her with fierce, burning eyes that swept her until she felt that the boyish clothes that covered her slender limbs were stripped from her, leaving the beautiful white body bare under his passionate stare.” Under the circumstances, one cannot help feeling that her question, “Why have you brought me here?” betrays a hint of naïveté.’
Perelman is better sipped than gulped, perhaps no more than three comic essays at a time. You can buy a second-hand copy of this volume for less than three quid on eBay. It is worth the trouble.
I read many of the stories in this book about thirty-five years ago. I was in eighth grade or so. I was steeped in the work of THE NEW YORKER humorists of the mid-century: James Thurber, E. B. White, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. Perelman was of particular interest to me for two reasons other than the fact that he was one of that crowd of writers: 1) He co-wrote two movie scripts for my heroes, The Marx Brothers (MONKEY BUSINESS and HORSEFEATHERS) and 2) He was still alive and writing. I had a subscription to THE NEW YORKER and, every four issues or so Perelman had a little piece. Anybody reading this review probably has some familiarity with Perelman's prose. It is miniaturist, complex and slapstick. Each piece (about a page and a half long with a column or two of advertisements and a cartoon) had six or seven words William F. Buckley would have been hard-pressed to define. I admit I was usually somewhat lost reading these, in a way which was not true when I read Thurber or, say, P. G. Wodehouse. While Perelman's stuff appeared every four issues or so circa 1974 (he being in his seventies then, or older) every six weeks or so there would be something by Woody Allen. It was clear to me even then that Woody Allen's stories were penned in homage to Perelman. It was as if Allen wanted to let Perelman know his writings had been worthwhile. I do not sense that Woody Allen was trying to compete with Perelman. First of all, the language was nowhere near as complex in Woody Allen's case and the tone was, somehow, a warmer one, but I do think Perelman picked up on the similarities. He did an interview on NBC's New York affiliate's "Live At Five" show just when the last book to come out in his lifetime (VINEGAR PUSS)was published. This was in 1975 or so. The interviewer asked him about NEW YORKER "casuals", the brief bits of humorous prose THE NEW YORKER had virtually invented, and Perelman said the only living practitioner of this art other than himself was Woody Allen. Perelman's writing is cold. You won't find a trace of pathos. Nevertheless, if you want to sample literary confection of the sort NEW YORKER readers used to inhale, seek THE MOST OF S.J. PERELMAN.
Perelman's my favorite humor author but I have to admit that this collection is all anyone should ever read. It covers almost thirty years of his career and has nearly a hundred of his pieces. None of the pieces I've read that weren't included are nearly as good as these. For new readers, I recommend reading the "Cloudland Revisited" pieces first, where Perelman reacquaints himself with films and books that influenced him as a boy. They are a lot more conversational and ease one into the stylistic flights he takes in the other pieces. Be prepared for mid-century pop culture references your grandparents barely remember and classical literary, artistic and musical references schools no longer teach us.
It took me ages to work my way through this extremely generous collection -- more than 600 pages of short magazine pieces (and a couple of short complete books) by Perelman. He was the master of the New Yorker school of wry humor pieces, heavy on wordplay, mockery, and verbal excess of all kinds. It's great stuff! He reminds me of Benchley, but with more emphasis on parody and less on himself.
My favorite pieces in the collection are the "Cloudland Revisited" series, scattered throughout -- Perelman went back to the books, and a few movies, that enchanted him as a teenager in the '20s and sees how they read to an adult. The results are highly amusing, and have given me a tremendous desire to read "Flaming Youth."
the funniest book ever, though it takes 411 days to read each piece by the late New York writer and personal and professional bitter shit (as well as Nathanael West's brother-in-law). Start with "Waiting for Santy," his spoof of Clifford Odets' didactic labor relations play, "Waiting for Lefty," where Perelman casts the oppressed workers as Santa's elves. Before Sedaris, thee was Perelman! (and actually, West too.)
If you want to experience Perelman (and you should), I would strongly recommend one of these anthologies. There's a lot of duplication with the individual books. The one exception I would make is for Westward Ha!.
Perelman wrote for the Marx Brothers and was one of Woody Allen's inspirations. He has contemporaries such as Dorothy Parker who can be as elegant in their humour but I don't think anybody this side of Gogol can be as maniacal.
This book contains a great many short humorous pieces S.J. Perelman wrote for weekly magazines between 1930 and 1958. I probably had been exposed to his work at some point prior to this, but The Most of S.J. Perelman brings him into sharp focus. And lest I forget to mention it, the intro by Dorothy Parker is well worth reading too.
Clearly, he was a master of short scenarios, containing embedded gems that evoke hilarity, at the expense of himself, high-society people, or simply language. Examples:
"While waiting around my doctor's anteroom to have a swelling excised from my checkbook ..."
"My witty reprimand fell among thorns."
"A hum of well-bred conversation rose from the throng, punctuated now and again by the click of expensive dentures."
"Living almost entirely on ... the few ptarmigan which fell to the ptrigger of his pfowling piece..."
He mentions a nanny for his kids who "built up the notion of snakes in the greenery to the point where screams rang out when a salad was placed on the table." He describes his savings account as "a whited sepulcher."
A few bits sound almost Joycean in their cleverness:
Greater love hath Onan."
And occasionally there's a longer passage that bears quoting, such as this:
"To anyone around here who is suffering from a touch of insomnia (surely no more than a hundred-to-one shot), the sequence of events in my bedroom last night may have a certain clinical interest. About nine o'clock, after a brisk session with the newscasters, I shuddered for approximately half an hour to relax my nerves, plugged a pair of Flents [?] into my ears, and tied on a sleep mask. I probably should have waited until I got into bed before doing so, as I took a rather nasty fall over a wastebasket..."
Yeah, there's more than a trace of silliness in some of this, and for that reason I think this sort of thing is probably better in small doses. No doubt S.J. Perelman' s original readers happily anticipated each week his latest short creation in whatever publication was carrying it. But since a book-length collection is what we now have, I suppose the remedy for us is to avoid binge reading.
One of those original readers might have been my father, who subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post during the latter part of Perelman's career. If so, he surely would have enjoyed the series on the misadventures of becoming a gentleman farmer (which in any case did not dissuade my father from trying his own luck at that undertaking a few years later).
The outcome of each scenario becomes predictable (for me it brings James Herriot to mind.). When Perelman envisions transforming an "anemic little creek" on his estate into "a fiord about the size of Lake Huron," one knows in advance that when the workers have collected their fee and departed he will have "a small, shrunken buffalo wallow infested with every variety of poisonous snake known to man."
The gentleman farmer sequences have a lot of this sort of thing:
"At 2:30 I was dozing on the porch of my rustic retreat, in tune with the infinite and my fellow-man. Above my head, instead of the usual saw biting through a log labeled 'z-z-z,' was an acetylene torch cutting a steel girder; there is no room on the up-to-date farm for antiquated methods. At 2:35, roused from my reverie by my wife's broom, I was toiling up a ninety-degree incline with two king-sized pails of garbage..."
Silliness aside, I find it enjoyable because he's poking fun at the insecurities of his intended audience (primarily, men like my long-departed father) and in so doing is recalling a much simpler, kinder world than we have today.
An entertaining collection of essays, anecdotes, and (in his "Cloudland revisited" series) reviews of early movies written by Perelman for the New Yorker magazine during the middle decades of the 20th century. Though understandably many of the topics are dated to the modern palate, the articles zip with a warm humour which in its finest moments reaches the heights of the bizarre. The more outre stories crackle with wit and ready shining non-sequitur, no surprise given that Perelman was co-writer of several of the Marx Brothers' finest movies. A delight from start to finish.
Just about all he wrote is reading-and-laughing-out-loud-and-then-the-neighbors-look-at-you-funny funny. I started to read his books voraciously when I was about 11, and read them sometimes aloud to any captive audience--and for some reason, I wanted to be SJ Perelman when I grew up. Obviously that wasn't a viable career path--he was still SJ Perelman, and I wasn't. Obviously. Oh, well.
If you want to experience Perelman (and you should), I would strongly recommend one of these anthologies. There's a lot of duplication with the individual books. The one exception I would make is for Westward Ha!.
It took me months to finish this collection of short humorous pieces. As witty as Perelman was, the humor does get a little repetitious. There are many topical references only some of which still have relevance today. One of the author's recurring themes is reviewing from his current life a popular film or novel that entranced him as a youth. Predictably, most silent films are found to be technically and plot deficient. Perelman also takes on such easy targets as puip style authors such as Burroughs and Sax Rohmer. My favorite pieces were the two sections originally published as independent books on an around the world trip and the purchase and remodeling of a Pennsylvania farm. These were more engaging for me as there was at least a little narrative pull. So if you want to be acquainted with this author and this style of humor, the book is worth reading. I am not sure it merits 650 pages of devoted reading though!
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.
First of all, if you're under 50, don't bother. In fact it's getting to be I'd say that if you're under 60. Not only his style but some of his offhand racial and gender stereotypes can be a little breathtaking. But the pieces in this book span the years 1930 to 1958 and if you expect them to conform to the mores of 2020 you are being whatever the opposite of anachronistic is.
Perelman is impossibly erudite and a consummate stylist. You feel like you should be attired in evening dress, seated in your Queen Anne wing-back leather chair, Debussy murmuring quietly on the gramophone in the background, before you should be vouchsafed the honor of perusing his sparkling "feuilletons" (to use his preferred description).
Keep your unabridged nearby on your hand-carved walnut book stand (or just your smart phone's dictionary app) in case the meanings of words such as tergiversate, embonpoint, or debouch have temporarily slipped your mind.
You can see the traces of where Woody Allen, Thurber, Benchley and other top drawer writers of humor derived some of their style. The short introduction by Steve Martin is very funny (Martin's Cruel Shoes is a classic of humor writing on its own).
Woody Allen's observation is apposite: "When you're a young writer and you read Perelman, what happens is fatal since his style seeps into you."
The best solution is to read Perelman and don't try to be Perelman.
A difficult book for me, as I'm not that sophisticated in literary humor, and don't like spending large portion of leisure reading time on reference research or etymology, nonetheless, I'm not a lazy reader. The satirical pieces on the books and movies are often packed with details little known to younger generation. Other subject matters on business, society, or daily life in his pen are the ageless comedies.
Began reading Perelman in The New Yorker, in my schooldays, on advice of my father, properly concerned for my education. Snapped up 'The Most of' on publication. It illuminates my shelves still today, his lines and images slipping wickedly into mind afresh, enlivening a mood, setting the world back on its axis for a brief moment. Long live SJP.
Many witty stories and observations make this collection something to dip into and go back to, though many of the references fetch back to the 50's and 60's of American culture. Many laugh out loud moments.
It might not be too profound, but I got hooked immediately. And apparently I'm not the only one. All in all, this was one of the most entertaining books that I've read.