Word: perelman
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ALMOST nobody writes humorous essays any more, perhaps because the world has become too serious a place. Robert Benchley is gone, and James Thurber is gone, but S.J. Perelman comes forth periodically to reassure us that the art is not yet dead...
...course, Perelman is not quite like the others. His humor is subtler, his vocabulary larger, his style more sophisticated; and the weird world he inhabits is a creation all his own. But he is like Benchley and Thurber in that he is funny. Perelman is quite probably the funniest man around...
...latest book, The Rising Gorge, Perelman's humor seems broader than in the past. He indulges frequently in the kind of wisecrack that makes the reader laugh out loud, instead of trying to evoke only nods and smiles. "And look at me today. How old a man would you say I was?" a health faddist asks Perelman...
...Beauty Part has already had a late summer stock tryout-a two-week run at Producer Michael Ellis' Bucks County Playhouse (TIME, July 7). It is Perelman's first, cautious flirtation with the stage since he swore off theatrical writing after a minor disaster called Sweet Bye and Bye closed on the road in 1947. On opening night Perelman was horrified to hear Star Bert Lahr forgetting roughly half his lines, filling in the gaps with Chinese proverbs of his own invention. But Lahr eventually learned his part, and Producer Ellis began arrangements to take The Beauty Part...
...Beauty Part is not a collection of isolated gags. From Greenwich Village to Hollywood, the play is stitched throughout with the oblique, neatly sutured, thematic wit of S. J. Perelman. The display of words is, in fact, so dazzling that any mail-order Melville in the audience must get the message along with the fellow from Yale: "Lay off the Muses. It's a very tough dollar...