The World of S J Perelman

"The funniest human being in my lifetime, in any medium – whether it’s stand-up, television, theatre, prose, or movies – is SJ Perelman. There is nobody funnier than SJ Perelman. I prefer his middle to later stuff. The early stuff was a little wild, not nearly as subtle or as good. As he developed over the years, he became relentlessly sensational. There are many collections of Perelman that are filled with great things. This one, which I wrote the foreword to, has a number of spectacular pieces. Because the editors did it chronologically, my own opinion is that the first four essays are weaker. Once you hit the fifth casual, as The New Yorker called them, he hits his stride and the rest of them are absolute comic genius. As funny as you can get. Those of us who grew up with Perelman found it impossible to avoid his influence. In music, if you grow up listening to Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk or Louis Armstrong and you listen to their recordings over and over, then you start to play their kind of riffs and rhythms naturally. I’m sure an actor who adores Marlon Brando – worships him and sees every movie he’s made – starts to play a scene and a little bit of Brando creeps into it. It’s the same with Perelman: you read him over and over again – as I did and many of my contemporaries did when we were growing up – and then when you write, it’s hard to escape his influence. He had such a strong, inventive style. The problem is you don’t get the outlets for it anymore. You know, The New Yorker used to be primarily a literary magazine. Economics have forced it to change over the years. When I was younger, any given issue would have a Perelman piece, maybe something by Salinger, a couple of poems and maybe something by Truman Capote or John Updike. It was a literary magazine. Now a miniscule part of the magazine is devoted to comedy, apart from the cartoons. This Shouts And Murmurs thing they do, you grudgingly get a page, which I think is ridiculous. They remain the number one outlet for comic writing, but even they’ve diluted the output. So much of that short stuff that you see in The New Yorker is just a comic idea that some writer gets and puts down. But it’s not really comic literature in the tradition of SJ Perelman or Robert Benchley or James Thurber or Dorothy Parker . There might be just as many funny writers today, but they don’t have places to put their material."