Word: perelman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Baby, it's Cold Inside is good but not great Perelman. Some of the pieces are hugely funny, but many seem a trifle flat, lacking the sudden explosion of unexpected phrases that makes much of his prose so spectacular. Perhaps America was getting him down as he wrote these pieces, dampening his usually exuberant imagination with a little too much harsh reality...
When his style is working, though, Perelman can be so funny it's almost awe-inspiring. What can one say about the words he sprinkles through the book, always in impeccably proper context: words like dyspnea, archimandrite, steatopygous, and eisteddfod? And what would Dickens have given to use this description of a bellhop at an old Hollywood hotel: "a stoop-shouldered, overworked wraith with an air of patient resignation like that of Zasu Pitts." Perelman is making a pass at a beautiful colleen (all his women are beautiful but for lips or nostrils that are a trifle too sensuous...
...PERELMAN'S subjects range from reminiscences of the Marx Brothers to an encounter with a singing lady dentist who plants a radio transmitter in his incisor and calls him up when she hears him eating a forbidden bagel ("Lock Lips-Monkey-shines in the Bridgework"). Very rarely does he have any real satiric intentions. In one piece, though, "Let a Snarl Be Your Umbrella," there is a hint of very good-natured satire. Perelman finds himself ignored, insulted, and humiliated by a series of British clerks, in what appears to be a conspiracy to make the customer suffer. He discovers...
...piece entitled "Anna Trivia Pluralized," Perelman, on a trip to Ireland, is beset on all sides by people trying to sell him the same anecdote about a "prosaic old codger" who wonders whatever happened to old John Joyce's son Jim-the one that went to the Jesuit College at Clongowes. Perelman is able to resist this fabulous literary nugget, but he overhears a professor smugly telling his wife Chlorine that it was worth the hundred dollars he had paid for it: "It throws Joyce's youth into a wholly new perspective, crystallizing in a phrase, as it does...
...called "Thunder Under the Kalahari" or, Aliquid Novi ex Botswana? Prefaced by an item in the London Times about the discovery of truffles in the Kalahari desert and the possible resulting boost to the economy of Botswana (the former Bechuanaland), it's a tale of intrigue, adventure, and romance. Perelman is ensconced in the Mushmouth Arms, Bexhill-on-Sea, knowing that it is at this type of dreary seaside resort that one runs into an eccentric fellow guest who imparts some remarkable tale. Sure enough, he finds a strange old man there named Monk Hesseltine who quivers at the mention...