Word: perelman
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...Jules Verne's legendary globe circler, Phileas Fogg, 98 years ago, U.S. Humorist SJ. Perelman plans to step out of London's Reform Club and go around the world in 80 days. No more, no less. Fogg, said Verne, employed "steamers, railways, carriages, yachts, merchant vessels, sledges, elephants." As far as possible, 66-year-old Circumnavigator Perelman will confine himself to such modes in following Fogg's itinerary. In place of Fogg's famed manservant, Passepartout, Perelman prefers female traveling companionship. Though he has had "five applications for the post from various birds," he says...
...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...
...Baby, it's Cold Inside is of that quality. But in a country of Bob Hope and Lucille Ball and Alan King, S. J. Perelman is a humorist worth keeping...