One of the cultural casualties of the internet, that cultural cataclysm, has been to writerly brevity. Once, writers were constrained by the available space on a newspaper or magazine page, a truly scarce resource. But these days, they can go on and on and on. We are inundated by long reads, deep dives, and podcasts whose practitioners assume there is no limit to their insight or our interest.
Standing against this onslaught of verbosity is the example of American humorist Sidney Joseph Perelman (1904-1979), whose bracingly brief comic sketches enlivened countless issues of the magazines Judge and, before it surgically removed its sense of humor, the New Yorker.
Though he reached the ripe old age of 75, S.J. Perelman never burdened his readers with anything like a magnum opus. There is no solo-penned novel in the Perelman bibliography, and though he was a prolific screenwriter, there is no masterpiece among his credits, just tossed-off trivialities like the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business and the Oscar-winning adaptation of Around the World in Eighty Days. Instead, his legacy amounts to about 450 sketches sending up trends, habits and cultural artifacts, most of these digestible in the time it takes to eat a Snickers bar.
Ironically, Perelman’s briskness made him the ideal author for book-length compendia. Among the many issued during his lifetime, Strictly from Hunger (1937), Acres and Pains (1947), and Westward Ha! (1948) were perhaps the best. The format suited Perelman: If a particular sketch in any of these volumes left you cold, you could simply flip ahead or behind a few pages for another one.
In 2021, the Library of America rightly installed Perelman in its pantheon, but recognizing that a fat, ungainly hardcover book is not the best format for readers to consume this master of the miniature, the publisher has just brought out two softcover collections. The first is a reprint of the 1947 edition of his classic 1944 collection, Crazy Like a Fox, and the second a definitive gathering of his slashing tributes to the cheesy books and movies he devoured as a young man, Cloudland Revisited.
“These pieces might seem disposable — they were written, at least they should’ve been written, to be disposable — and yet they appear to have endured and not only as academic fish-wrap or fudgy slices of nostalgia,” writes novelist Joshua Cohen in his introduction to Crazy Like a Fox. But far more persuasive than Cohen’s mixed-metaphor-rich exercise in Perelman apologetics is the writer himself in the pages that follow.
In the representative “Adorable, Taxable You,” Perelman scrutinizes an income-tax brochure (the apparently authentic “Income Tax” by David Joseph, CPA) as though it was a book under review in the New York Times. “It was selling like hot cakes the day I got my copy at a cut-rate drugstore; in fact, a stack of hot cakes nearby was entirely ignored and fast becoming cold cakes while customers fought with each other around a dwindling pile of Mr. Joseph’s ‘Income Tax,’” Perelman writes in a typical nonsense digression. Returning to the “book” itself, Perelman proceeds to treat case studies as though they concerned real characters: “As if the lives of James Taxpayer and John and Frances Wedd were not vivid enough already, the author presents them in facsimile income-tax returns, a device any novelist would have given his Windsor tie to anticipate.” The joint return filed by the latter “couple,” Perelman writes, shows their lives to be “at once humdrum and bizarre”: “What is meant by the deduction on Line 6 of Schedule D, ‘Clearances, Charges and Garbage, $7,417.21’?” Then again, Perelman writes, “this is presumably Mr. Joseph’s first book.”
Perelman has a polymathic gift for assuming literary styles. The Waiting for Lefty-derived playlet “Waiting for Santy” unfolds in “the sweatshop of S. Claus,” who is described as “a pompous bourgeois of sixty-five who affects a white beard and a false air of benevolence” and whose “gnomes” have names including Rankin, Panken, and Rivkin. “A Farewell to Omsk,” whose subtitle reveals it was written after its author devoured “an entire gift set” of Dostoyevsky novels in a single afternoon, contains lines such as these: “‘Well, Afya Afyakievitch,’ he said with a sly smile, ‘what can I sell you today? Cigarettes, perhaps?’”
Best of all is the classic Chandler-inspired “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer,” which exactingly replicates crime fiction patois only to undermine it, sometimes within the space of a single paragraph. “Her face was veiled, watchful,” the private-eye narrator says, plausibly. Then he adds, rather less plausibly, “I stared at her ears, liking the way they were joined to her head. There was something complete about them; you knew they were there for keeps.” Well, who can resist a comic sketch that contains a line like this: “By the time I worked back to the Arbogast Building, via the Weehawken ferry and the George Washington Bridge to cover my tracks, all the pieces were in place.”
Sometimes, the titles themselves are sufficient to bring about a smile, as in “To Sleep, Perchance to Steam.” Sometimes, Perelman’s non sequiturs are funnier than the infrastructure surrounding them; in “Nothing but the Tooth,” the narrator is discussing how his grandfather was “rather active in his nineties” before explaining that he is not referring, as we might assume, to his grandfather’s stamina but to his theft: He was “active,” it seems, “between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues — they finally got him for breaking and entering.” Always, these offerings glisten with the promise of the unexpected weird.
In Cloudland Revisited, Perelman’s responses to assorted dated works of pop culture never fail to amuse. He claims that “the only known antidote” for watching the Lillian Gish silent movie melodrama Way Down East is the consumption of “a double banana split with oodles of fudge sauce.”
At the end of his “review” of that tax brochure, Perelman sums up his assessment of its author this way: “His prose is childish, his grammar unspeakable, and his point of view materialistic, but I loved every word, even the ones that made me sleepy.” Except for the part about bad grammar, the same could be said of the gems in these wonderful and timeless little books.
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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.