Background
He was born in Brooklyn and brought up in Providence, Rhode Island, where his father worked “successively, but not successfully” as a machinist, a dry goods merchant, and a farmer.
(This book includes many of the greatest hits from 1930 to...)
This book includes many of the greatest hits from 1930 to 1958--available only in this edition--by the devastatingly witty Perelman, the leading figure of The New Yorker magazine's golden age of humor and one of the most popular American humorists ever. In these hilarious pieces, the charmingly cranky Perelman turns his scathing attention to books, movies, New York socialites, the newspaper business, country life, travel, Hollywood, the publishing industry, and, last but not least, himself. His self-portrait: "Under a forehead roughly comparable to . . . Piltdown Man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and concupiscence. . . . Before they made S. J. Perelman, they broke the mold." Sophisticated and supremely mischievous, Perelman is an acrobat of language who turns a phrase and then, before the reader has time to finish admiring his agility, turns it again.
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(This definitive collection brings together the finest of ...)
This definitive collection brings together the finest of Sidney Joseph Perelman's comic writings, satires and parodies, from The Customer is Always Wrong and Boy Meets Gull to Is There an Osteosynchrondroitrician in the House? and The Pants Recaptured.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0413777235/?tag=2022091-20
(A collection, spanning 30 years, of Perelman's humorous m...)
A collection, spanning 30 years, of Perelman's humorous mock-solemn commentaries on the absurdities of our times.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000GSB2VW/?tag=2022091-20
(THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN is the hilarious and unforgetta...)
THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN is the hilarious and unforgettable account of the master humorist Perelman's trip around the world with his wife, son, daughter, and a cello. This collection of stories, originally published in Holiday in the late 1940s, is jam-packed with Perelman's signature wit and extraordinary prose style.
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(Entering the warped world of S.J. Perelman is an experien...)
Entering the warped world of S.J. Perelman is an experience. Written mainly for "New Yorker" magazine from the 1930s onwards, his sketches made reckless guerilla forays behind enemy lines to expose the absurdities of modern life and bring succour to that most persecuted minority of all: the embattled sane. A scalpel-keen satirist and parodist, he assembled a baroque range of registers and genres to lampoon the pretentions and inanities of the new language of popular culture wherever he found it - in advertising, publishing, magazines, movies, television and newspapers. But, more often than not, it is Perelman's own mock-sombre and eternally put-upon fictional persona who is the undoubted star of these sketches. While all he craves is a little peace and sanity, he is continually pushed closer to the edge by the steady stream of those sent to try him: movie moguls, the Marx brothers, Broadway impresarios, dry cleaners, house painters, insurance salesmen, au pairs, dentists and second-hand car dealers.
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(Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include compa...)
Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include companion materials, may have some shelf wear, may contain highlighting/notes, may not include CDs or access codes. 100% money back guarantee.
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(S. J. Perelman was, is, and will always be America's Mast...)
S. J. Perelman was, is, and will always be America's Master Humorist, an artist whose nonpareil gift of ridicule, dazzling verbal effects, polished style, and keen observation made him a unique and precious figure in our literature. His work lives on in a book that contains seventeen pieces never before collected.
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He was born in Brooklyn and brought up in Providence, Rhode Island, where his father worked “successively, but not successfully” as a machinist, a dry goods merchant, and a farmer.
At first Perelman wanted to be a cartoonist, and while studying at Browm University, he had what he called “a brief, precarious toehold as assistant art editor” of Casements, the campus humorous literary magazine.
Perelman wrote many brief, humorous descriptions of his travels for various magazines, and of his travails on his Pennsylvania farm, all of which were collected into books. (A few were illustrated by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who accompanied Perelman on the round-the-world trip recounted in Westward Ha!)
Perelman is highly regarded for his humorous short pieces that he published in magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, most often in The New Yorker. For these, he is considered the first surrealist humor writer of the United States. In these numerous brief sketches he pioneered a new style that was unique to him, using parody to "wring every drop of false feeling or slovenly thinking."
They were infused with a sense of ridicule, irony, and wryness and frequently used his own misadventures as their theme. Perelman chose to describe these pieces as feuilletons — a French literary term meaning "literary or scientific articles; serial stories" (literally "little leaves") — and he defined himself as a feuilletoniste. Perelman's only attempt at a conventional novel (Parlor, Bedlam and Bath, written in collaboration with Q J Reynolds) was unsuccessful, and throughout his life he was resentful that authors who wrote in the full-length form of novels received more literary respect (and financial success) than short-form authors like himself even as he openly admired British humorist P.G. Wodehouse. While many believe Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge to be a novel, it is actually his first collection of humorous pieces, many written while he was still a student at Brown. It is largely considered juvenilia and its pieces were never included in future Perelman collections.
The tone of Perelman's feuilletons, however, was very different from those sketches of the inept "little man" struggling to cope with life that James Thurber and other New Yorker writers of the era frequently produced.[citation needed] Yet his references to himself were typically wittily self-deprecatory—as for example, "before they made S. J. Perelman, they broke the mold." Although frequently fictional, very few of Perelman's sketches were precisely short stories.
Sometimes he would glean an apparently off-hand phrase from a newspaper article or magazine advertisement and then write a brief, satiric play or sketch inspired by that phrase. A typical example is his 1950s work, "No Starch in the Dhoti, S'il Vous Plait." Beginning with an off-hand phrase in a New York Times Magazine article ("...the late Pandit Motilal Nehru—who sent his laundry to Paris—the young Jawaharlal's British nurse etc. etc. ...), Perelman composed a series of imaginary letters that might have been exchanged in 1903 between an angry Pandit Nehru in India and a sly Parisian laundryman about the condition of his laundered underwear.
In other sketches, Perelman would satirize popular magazines or story genres of his day. In "Somewhere A Roscoe," he pokes fun at the "purple prose" writing style of 1930s pulp magazines such as Spicy Detective. In "Swing Out, Sweet Chariot," he examines the silliness of the "jive language" found in The Jitterbug, a teen magazine with stories inspired by the 1930s Swing dance craze. Perelman voraciously read magazines to find new material for his sketches. (He often referred to the magazines as "Sauce for the gander.")
Perelman also occasionally used a form of word play that was, apparently, unique to him. He would take a common word or phrase and change its meaning completely within the context of what he was writing, generally in the direction of the ridiculous. In Westward Ha!, for instance, he writes: "The homeward-bound Americans were as merry as grigs (the Southern Railway had considerately furnished a box of grigs for purposes of comparison) ... ". Another classic Perelman pun is "I've got Bright's Disease and he's got mine".
He also wrote a notable series of sketches called Cloudland Revisited in which he gives acid (and disillusioned) descriptions of recent viewings of movies (and recent re-readings of novels) that had enthralled him as a youth in Providence, Rhode Island, later as a student at Brown University, and then while a struggling comic artist in Greenwich Village.
A number of his works were set in Hollywood and in various places around the world. He stated that as a young man he was heavily influenced by James Joyce and Flann O'Brien, particularly his wordplay, obscure words and references, metaphors, irony, parody, paradox, symbols, free associations, clang associations, non-sequiturs, and sense of the ridiculous. All these elements infused Perelman's own writings but his own style was precise, clear, and the very opposite of Joycean stream of consciousness. Perelman drily admitted to having been such a Ring Lardner thief that he should have been arrested. Woody Allen has in turn admitted to being influenced by Perelman and recently has written what can only be called tributes, in very much the same style. The two once happened to have dinner at the same restaurant, and when the elder humorist sent his compliments, the younger comedian mistook it for a joke. Authors that admired Perelman's ingenious style included T. S. Eliot and W. Somerset Maugham.
(This book includes many of the greatest hits from 1930 to...)
(This definitive collection brings together the finest of ...)
(THE SWISS FAMILY PERELMAN is the hilarious and unforgetta...)
(A collection, spanning 30 years, of Perelman's humorous m...)
(Entering the warped world of S.J. Perelman is an experien...)
(Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include compa...)
(S. J. Perelman was, is, and will always be America's Mast...)
Member Screen Writers Guild, Dramatists Guild, National Institute Arts and Letters. Club: Century Association.
Perelman was indirectly responsible for the success of Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22. When first published, this novel received lukewarm reviews and indifferent sales. A few months later, Perelman was interviewed for a national publication. The interviewer asked Perelman if he had read anything funny lately. Perelman a man not noted for generosity with his praise went to considerable lengths to commend Catch-22. After the interview was published, sales of Heller's novel skyrocketed.
Perelman picked up plenty of pungent expressions from Yiddish and liberally sprinkled his prose with these phrases, thus paving the way for the likes of Philip Roth.
The phrase "crazy like a fox" gained currency in the 20th century after Perelman used it as a book title in 1944.
Quotes from others about the person
A British expert on comic writing, Frank Muir, lauded Perelman as the best American comic author of all time in his Oxford Book of Humorous Prose. Humorist Garrison Keillor has declared his admiration for Perelman's writing. Keillor's 'Jack Schmidt, Arts Administrator' is a parody of Perelman's classic 'Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer', itself a parody of the Raymond Chandler school of tough, amorous 'private-eye' crime fiction. Irish comedian and actor, Dylan Moran listed Perelman as a major influence in his December 13, 2012 interview on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast.
Perelman's personal life was difficult. In 1929 at the age of 25 he married the 18-year-old sister of his school friend Nathanael West, Laura West (née Lorraine Weinstein). The two worked as writing collaborators on the 1935 play All Good Americans, produced on Broadway, and both were signed by Irving Thalberg as contract screenwriters for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the same year. They remained married until Laura's death in 1970. Perelman did not remarry.
The marriage was strained from the start because of his innumerable affairs (notably with Leila Hadley). Both the 1986 biography by Dorothy Herrmann and the Selected Letters ("Don't Tread on Me", edited by Prudence Crowther) suffer from the fact that "Lotharian Sid's" erotic escapades and fantasies have been censored beyond recognition to protect certain individuals.
Perelman reportedly regarded children as a nuisance. Their son Adam (born in 1936) ended up in a reformatory for wayward boys. The two things that brought him happiness were his MG car and a mynah bird, both of which he pampered like babies. His Anglophilia turned rather sour when late in his life he (temporarily) relocated to England and actually had to socialize with the English themselves.
Perelman had a problematic relationship with Groucho Marx, who once said, "I hated the son of a bitch, and he had a head as big as my desk." In the later years of Perelman's career, he bristled at being identified as a writer of Marx Brothers material, insisting that his publishers omit any mention of it in publicity material.