Word: perelman
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...course, there are a few writers who merited dispensations allowing them to appear in public. One was S.J. Perelman, the sort of writer one would want to spend not an hour or two but a few days with. The point of meeting Perelman would, however, not be to find out whether that redoubtable wit could drop a line or two over breakfast like those he penned for the Marx Brothers, nor to determine if he poured forth in conversation the astonishing, almost Nabokovian, word-play that runs through his myriad of New Yorker stories. Perelman would certainly have proven disappointing...
...along the way like "henbane," "anchor," "parlous," "jardiniere" as well as an occasional "zounds" or "sweet-patootie". A cultural sponge that oozes erudition and arcana, he recalls Yeats in the same breath that he expounds on an ancient tooth powder advertisement. No matter what guise he shows up in, Perelman's persona is a curious mixture of gallic pride, English cynicism, and mostly, Yiddish fatalism. He is a foil who ventures quixotically into the world and then returns, each time, to testify that it is far more looney than...
...Perelman died two years ago, so until some biographer turns him into academic chopped liver, it is going to be hard to tell how much of the Perelman persona was Perelman himself. Until then, the only thing to go on is the 45-page autobiographical fragment "The Hindsight Saga," in the posthumous opus The Last Laugh which Perelman's publisher and executor have just produced. Concentrating on Perelman's early years in Hollywood, where he worked on the screenplays for the Marx Brother's Monkey Business and Horse Feathers and on a number of other comedies, it reveals a Perelman...
...rest of The Last Laugh, it is, unfortunately, low grade Perelman. For the last few years of his life, his writing lacked much of the snap that distinguished such earlier collections as Crazy Like a Fox and The Road to Miltdown. The writing in the last volume he published while alive, Eastward Ha! was somehow less densely funny, less wildly allusive than it had been before. The pieces in The Last Laugh, all of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, represent more of the same. In these last stories Perelman drifts more and more into a cosmic nostalgia which...
...Henry Miller, S.J. Perelman and Walt Whitman had holed up in a Michigan roadhouse to concoct a mystery yarn, the resulting melange of cosmic erotica, snappish humor and hirsute lyricism might resemble this send-up of the "tecs" by Poet and Novelist Jim Harrison (Farmer, Legends of the Fall). His mock hero, Johnny Lundgren, nicknamed Warlock, is a reluctant Swedish-American gumshoe who has been fired from his job as a foundation executive. He flees to the comforting semi-poverty of rural northern Michigan where irrelevance turns to comic Scandinavian angst. Trysts in his overheated Subaru prove difficult; his forays...