The Most of S.J. Perelman - A Definitive Collection: Thirty years and 650 pages of his finest and funniest writing

by S.J. Perelman

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Good, 1st Edition Thus, in collected form. Thick Royal 8vo. 650pp. Good clean tight sound square, no bookplate, inscription, foxed to fore-edges of leaves not intruding. In gilt lettered full blue cloth, together with original colour illustrated dustwrapper, neatly machine-sewn head and tail to transparent wrapper, spine with vertical crease and selotaped blurb front and rear to endpapers. Dorothy Parker in her Introduction 'Humour to me takes in many things; there must be courage, no awe, criticism, a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be S.J. Perelman.'

Genres: Humor, Fiction, Short Stories, Comedy, Essays, Journalism, Satire

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Sidney Joseph Perelman, almost always known as S. J. Perelman, was a Jewish-American humorist, author, and screenwriter. He is best known for his humorous short pieces written over many years for The New Yorker. He also wrote for several other magazines, as well as books, scripts, and screenplays.

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the wittiest writers of the twentieth century and a stylist without equal. The pieces reprinted from The Road to Miltown, especially the 'Cloudland Revisited' sequence, are the sharpest. Re-reading them, you marvel at their simplicity. The author sits down to watch a series of films he loved as a youth and summarises the plots. Simply that. But Perelman’s summaries contain more witty barbs than some comedians get through in a lifetime.

'The leitmotiv of Way Down East, like that of so many early film melodramas, was innocence betrayed, virtue - doggedly sullied through ten reels - riding triumphant and kneeing its traducer into the groin.'

'When Thomas Meighan's face, already icy to begin with, froze, it looked like Christmas at Crawford Notch.'

'Then she too weakens, for, as the subtitle puts it, "You may resist hunger, you may resist cold, but the fear of the unseen can break the strongest will." The unseen in this case takes the form of a moth-eaten cheetah rented from Charlie Gay's lion farm in El Monte.'

Novels scarcely fare better, such as E.M. Hull’s The Sheik:

‘The description of the desert corsair, though, as he takes inventory of his booty, attains a lyrical pitch current fiction has not surpassed: “It was the handsomest and cruellest fact that she had ever seen. Her gaze was drawn instinctively to his. He was looking at her with fierce, burning eyes that swept her until she felt that the boyish clothes that covered her slender limbs were stripped from her, leaving the beautiful white body bare under his passionate stare.” Under the circumstances, one cannot help feeling that her question, “Why have you brought me here?” betrays a hint of naïveté.’

Perelman is better sipped than gulped, perhaps no more than three comic essays at a time. You can buy a second-hand copy of this volume for less than three quid on eBay. It is worth the trouble.

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me ages to work my way through this extremely generous collection -- more than 600 pages of short magazine pieces (and a couple of short complete books) by Perelman. He was the master of the New Yorker school of wry humor pieces, heavy on wordplay, mockery, and verbal excess of all kinds. It's great stuff! He reminds me of Benchley, but with more emphasis on parody and less on himself.

My favorite pieces in the collection are the "Cloudland Revisited" series, scattered throughout -- Perelman went back to the books, and a few movies, that enchanted him as a teenager in the '20s and sees how they read to an adult. The results are highly amusing, and have given me a tremendous desire to read "Flaming Youth."

[Neal Karlen · Rating 5 out of 5]

the funniest book ever, though it takes 411 days to read each piece by the late New York writer and personal and professional bitter shit (as well as Nathanael West's brother-in-law). Start with "Waiting for Santy," his spoof of Clifford Odets' didactic labor relations play, "Waiting for Lefty," where Perelman casts the oppressed workers as Santa's elves. Before Sedaris, thee was Perelman! (and actually, West too.)

[Robert Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to experience Perelman (and you should), I would strongly recommend one of these anthologies. There's a lot of duplication with the individual books. The one exception I would make is for Westward Ha!.

[Al Maki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perelman wrote for the Marx Brothers and was one of Woody Allen's inspirations. He has contemporaries such as Dorothy Parker who can be as elegant in their humour but I don't think anybody this side of Gogol can be as maniacal.

[Jim O'shaughnessy · Rating 5 out of 5]

You will shake with laughter but you better have a dictionary handy.

[Stephen Gallup · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains a great many short humorous pieces S.J. Perelman wrote for weekly magazines between 1930 and 1958. I probably had been exposed to his work at some point prior to this, but The Most of S.J. Perelman brings him into sharp focus. And lest I forget to mention it, the intro by Dorothy Parker is well worth reading too.

Clearly, he was a master of short scenarios, containing embedded gems that evoke hilarity, at the expense of himself, high-society people, or simply language. Examples:

"While waiting around my doctor's anteroom to have a swelling excised from my checkbook ..."

"My witty reprimand fell among thorns."

"A hum of well-bred conversation rose from the throng, punctuated now and again by the click of expensive dentures."

"Living almost entirely on ... the few ptarmigan which fell to the ptrigger of his pfowling piece..."

He mentions a nanny for his kids who "built up the notion of snakes in the greenery to the point where screams rang out when a salad was placed on the table." He describes his savings account as "a whited sepulcher."

A few bits sound almost Joycean in their cleverness:

Greater love hath Onan."

And occasionally there's a longer passage that bears quoting, such as this:

"To anyone around here who is suffering from a touch of insomnia (surely no more than a hundred-to-one shot), the sequence of events in my bedroom last night may have a certain clinical interest. About nine o'clock, after a brisk session with the newscasters, I shuddered for approximately half an hour to relax my nerves, plugged a pair of Flents [?] into my ears, and tied on a sleep mask. I probably should have waited until I got into bed before doing so, as I took a rather nasty fall over a wastebasket..."

Yeah, there's more than a trace of silliness in some of this, and for that reason I think this sort of thing is probably better in small doses. No doubt S.J. Perelman' s original readers happily anticipated each week his latest short creation in whatever publication was carrying it. But since a book-length collection is what we now have, I suppose the remedy for us is to avoid binge reading.

One of those original readers might have been my father, who subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post during the latter part of Perelman's career. If so, he surely would have enjoyed the series on the misadventures of becoming a gentleman farmer (which in any case did not dissuade my father from trying his own luck at that undertaking a few years later).

The outcome of each scenario becomes predictable (for me it brings James Herriot to mind.). When Perelman envisions transforming an "anemic little creek" on his estate into "a fiord about the size of Lake Huron," one knows in advance that when the workers have collected their fee and departed he will have "a small, shrunken buffalo wallow infested with every variety of poisonous snake known to man."

The gentleman farmer sequences have a lot of this sort of thing:

"At 2:30 I was dozing on the porch of my rustic retreat, in tune with the infinite and my fellow-man. Above my head, instead of the usual saw biting through a log labeled 'z-z-z,' was an acetylene torch cutting a steel girder; there is no room on the up-to-date farm for antiquated methods. At 2:35, roused from my reverie by my wife's broom, I was toiling up a ninety-degree incline with two king-sized pails of garbage..."

Silliness aside, I find it enjoyable because he's poking fun at the insecurities of his intended audience (primarily, men like my long-departed father) and in so doing is recalling a much simpler, kinder world than we have today.

[Chasmom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just about all he wrote is reading-and-laughing-out-loud-and-then-the-neighbors-look-at-you-funny funny. I started to read his books voraciously when I was about 11, and read them sometimes aloud to any captive audience--and for some reason, I wanted to be SJ Perelman when I grew up. Obviously that wasn't a viable career path--he was still SJ Perelman, and I wasn't. Obviously. Oh, well.

[Bird · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, man, I loves me some SJ Perelman.

[David Allen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Occasionally hilarious, but mostly labored and unfunny. I guess I prefer my Perelman filtered through the Marx Brothers.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me months to finish this collection of short humorous pieces. As witty as Perelman was, the humor does get a little repetitious. There are many topical references only some of which still have relevance today. One of the author's recurring themes is reviewing from his current life a popular film or novel that entranced him as a youth. Predictably, most silent films are found to be technically and plot deficient. Perelman also takes on such easy targets as puip style authors such as Burroughs and Sax Rohmer.
My favorite pieces were the two sections originally published as independent books on an around the world trip and the purchase and remodeling of a Pennsylvania farm. These were more engaging for me as there was at least a little narrative pull.
So if you want to be acquainted with this author and this style of humor, the book is worth reading. I am not sure it merits 650 pages of devoted reading though!

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

S.J. Perelman was an American humorist, best known for his short pieces in The New Yorker and for writing two of the best Marx Brothers films. This collection of New Yorker stories is not necessarily best read in large chunks (it's a massive collection), but rather as one takes appetizers. Perelman may have the best vocabulary of any American writer I've ever read. His turns of phrase are often brilliant and made more so by the astonishing range of words with which he turns those phrases. The pieces are largely divided into two kinds: those in which an event or a news item or such has caught his attention and he spins off a scenario or readers' theatre script satirizing its foibles, and those in which he recounts adventures from his own life. All of these are wonderfully amusing, but the real laughs I found to reside almost always in his tales of his own experiences. Included is a portion of Westward Ha!, a hilarious tellling of his 'round-the-world trip with Broadway caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, and if the entire 600 pages of this book had been devoted to that trip, I would have been delighted. Also of particular interest are a couple of pieces relating to his friendship with Groucho Marx. It's no wonder that Perelman wrote so well for the Marxes, as his somewhat surreal sense of humor is a great match for theirs. Perelman is for comic writing, as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are for hardboiled stories, one of the great purveyors of a kind of language that doesn't exist anymore except in parody or homage, an ironic, witty, and utterly of-its-time style that defies (for me at least) explanation or precise definition, but which is the soul of American letters in the 1920s and '30s.

[Jude · Rating 5 out of 5]

Began reading Perelman in The New Yorker, in my schooldays, on advice of my father, properly concerned for my education. Snapped up 'The Most of' on publication. It illuminates my shelves still today, his lines and images slipping wickedly into mind afresh, enlivening a mood, setting the world back on its axis for a brief moment. Long live SJP.

Jude Moriarty

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many witty stories and observations make this collection something to dip into and go back to, though many of the references fetch back to the 50's and 60's of American culture. Many laugh out loud moments.

[Hannah F · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess you have to be a fan of old school rambling essays or be a the new Yorker fan (always found it as a whole quite pretentious)

i couldn't get into it.I got bored

I really tried .started and stopped half a dozen essays..

yes his writing is well done. just bored.

oh well

[read]

from Pure Pleasure by John Carey
'The Road to Miltown, or Under the Spreading Atrophy' by S.J. Perelman

[Seeraj Shaikh]

It might not be too profound, but I got hooked immediately. And apparently I'm not the only one. All in all, this was one of the most entertaining books that I've read.

[John Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perelman is a wordsmith without equal and deserves to be rediscovered. His essays require a dictionary but your vocabulary will thank you.

[Richard Bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book funny stuff but way too many words I needed to look up and after awhile I didn't bother.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perelman’s humor manages to be both intellectual and raucous at the same time. This is frequently reminiscent of the sense of humor in the Marx Brothers movies, not surprising as he worked as a writer for them.

[CJ Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Before they made me they broke the mould."

Hilarious.

[Harry Balden]

funniness degrades with time and that is sad

[Dana · Rating 2 out of 5]

if you think ten dollar words are funny then you'll think this is hilarious

[David C Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic.