Word: perelman
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...Death: "What are you talking about? You're going to the Beyond-you know how far that is?" Ackerman: "So?" Death: "So where's gas? Where's tolls?" Nat: "We're going by car!" The Chrysler to oblivion could easily have been concocted by S.J. Perelman. The master parodist's influence shows in another sketch. Notes from the Overfed. Allen writes, after reading Dostoevsky and Weight Watchers magazine on the same plane trip: "I am fat. I am disgustingly fat ... My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat ... If there...
...fine"). In this, and in most of his other recent pieces, Allen displays a debt to the creator of the Blind Explanation, Robert Benchley ("There is no such place as Budapest"). "Benchley has become a new idol for me," Allen says today. "Perhaps because everybody else also imitates Perelman's complicated style, I've tried to get simpler, like Benchley, and to write about subjects that really concern...
Language, like the world it represents, can never be static. Even today the pun survives fitfully in tabloid headlines: JUDGES WEIGH FAN DANCER'S ACT, FIND IT WANTON. It survives in the humor of S.J. Perelman, the only post-Joycean writer capable of fluent bilingual flippancy: "lox vobiscum," "the Saucier's Apprentice," and the neo-Joycean "Anna Trivia Pluralized." The pun makes its happiest regular appearance in the work of Novelist Peter De Vries, who writes stories about compulsive punners. "I can't stop," he claims. "I even dream verbal puns. Like the one in which...
Neither Got Tired. Once established as a light versifier, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, worked in Hollywood and collaborated with S.J. Perelman on the 1943 Broadway hit One Touch of Venus. The verse came out by the volume. He once remarked: "I often wonder whether I will get tired of writing them before the public gets tired of reading them, or whether it will happen the other way." He never tired of writing, and his public never tired of reading...
Gathering material in Taipei for his latter-day Around the World in Eighty Days, Humorist's Humorist S.J. Perelman visited a place of refreshment called the Literary Inn. Suddenly he was surrounded by a draggle of highly painted professional ladies who obviously wanted more than his autograph. Only with some difficulty did the world traveler extricate himself from their importunities, but he emerged with wit unblunted. "It was a case," he mused to a friend on the way back to his hotel, "of the tail dogging...