Word: perelman
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...talk is that the nature, quality and targets of American humor are undergoing considerable change. Bob Hope and Columnist Russell Baker both believe that the change is for the better, and Carol Burnett proclaims: "Humor has gotten braver; we're doing nuttier, wilder things." S. J. Perelman, on the other hand, says unequivocally: "I have never seen so much ghastly work, even in television, as this year." And as far as Playwright (Cactus Flower} Abe Burrows is concerned, "there is nothing to kid any more. This is the age of consensus, and all the humorists are censoring themselves...
...laughter is everywhere; TV has become a robot talking to itself, giggling at its own jokes. Even the few truly humorous shows-Get Smart!, The Dick Van Dyke Show-cannot fulfill the demand to be funny and original week after week. "It's not surprising," says S. J. Perelman, "that people who do weekly comedy shows on television are reduced to drivel...
...film producer and scenarist to make a great film of the life and death of a Southern town. The characters involved in all this might seem a shade unsubtle even to the simple eye of Central Casting Office file clerk, and their names are something that S. J. Perelman would love to give a droll roll on his tongue. They include Bradwell Tolliver, Lettice Poindexter, Gomp ("Frog-eye") Drumm and Mortimer ["Jingle Bells") Spurlin. Everybody seems to go by a nickname in Fiddlersburg; even the electric chair in the local pen is called "Sukie...
Quoth the sunburned satirist: "I look like a peeling billboard." Thus out of the bush near Nairobi, Kenya, strewing perels of witdom to mark his trail, came a hornrimmed, slyly befuddled big white hunter known to civilized nations as Humorist S. J. Perelman, 59. Having bagged a Broadway comedy hit. The Beauty Part, Perelman was an author in search of "four magazine articles." At the end of his Land-Roving safari through Kenya, he caromed up to London, hoping later to join a tiger shoot in India, then on to Burma and Bangkok to see what the jet-set drifters...
What vitiates Perelman's wit is over-specialization. He has always been a deftly ironic autopsist of what is dead in language. But he is a coroner more of the written than the spoken cliche, so that The Beauty Part sounds as if it were printed on the stage rather than performed on it. Parody is, at best, a parasitic form, no stronger than the host body it is fastened to, and in this case the host is junky novels, flea-brained Hollywood scenarios, self-help journals, and ad jingles. Pop culture is turned into pop parody...