Word: perelman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ALMOST nobody writes humorous essays any more, perhaps because the world has become too serious a place. Robert Benchley is gone, and James Thurber is gone, but S.J. Perelman comes forth periodically to reassure us that the art is not yet dead...
...course, Perelman is not quite like the others. His humor is subtler, his vocabulary larger, his style more sophisticated; and the weird world he inhabits is a creation all his own. But he is like Benchley and Thurber in that he is funny. Perelman is quite probably the funniest man around...
...latest book, The Rising Gorge, Perelman's humor seems broader than in the past. He indulges frequently in the kind of wisecrack that makes the reader laugh out loud, instead of trying to evoke only nods and smiles. "And look at me today. How old a man would you say I was?" a health faddist asks Perelman...
...Eine Kleine Mothmusik," a fascinating correspondence between Perelman and Mr. S. Merlin of Busy Bee Cleaners, Merlin writes that Perelman's maid "says you need a bulldozer, not a servant, and the pay is so small she can do better on relief." Throughout The Rising Gorge, Perelman allows himself this sort of knee-slapper somewhat more often than, as I remember, he did in his earlier pieces, and the result is an even more enjoyable brand of humor...
...Perelman pieces I always liked least were those in which he would take some real or imagined news release and construct an episode around it, to point out its utter absurdity, All too often the absurdity was quite evident at the outset, and the pieces were eminently predictable. Flailing dead turkeys as long as Perelman sometimes flails them gets to be pretty unfunny. Unfortunately, there are a few of these labored take-offs in The Rising Gorge...