Word: perelmans
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THERE ARE enough Americans living in exile nowadays that one more won't make much difference, I suppose. But S. J. Perelman's recently announced move to England should be a real cause for distress, if only for what it says about America's sense of humor. It's not just the violence, he says, it's the way the violence fills up the newspapers and doesn't leave any room for his stock in trade: the bizarre, the eccentric, and the unusual. England, he thinks, will be better. I hope he's right. I doubt...
...more than forty years S. J. Perelman has been writing some of the funniest things in English. He was a scriptwriter in Hollywood in the early thirties, and was responsible for some of the Marx Brothers' best films. In 1956 he won the N. Y. Film Critics' Award for the script of Around the World in 80 Days. Meanwhile he had found his niche in the New Yorker, writing the short, uncategorizable comic pieces which gave him his reputation, and thirty-two of which constitute Baby, it's Cold Inside. These pieces rely not so much on characters or situations...
...Baby, it's Cold Inside is good but not great Perelman. Some of the pieces are hugely funny, but many seem a trifle flat, lacking the sudden explosion of unexpected phrases that makes much of his prose so spectacular. Perhaps America was getting him down as he wrote these pieces, dampening his usually exuberant imagination with a little too much harsh reality...
When his style is working, though, Perelman can be so funny it's almost awe-inspiring. What can one say about the words he sprinkles through the book, always in impeccably proper context: words like dyspnea, archimandrite, steatopygous, and eisteddfod? And what would Dickens have given to use this description of a bellhop at an old Hollywood hotel: "a stoop-shouldered, overworked wraith with an air of patient resignation like that of Zasu Pitts." Perelman is making a pass at a beautiful colleen (all his women are beautiful but for lips or nostrils that are a trifle too sensuous...
...Baby, It's Cold Inside, Perelman...