THE AUTHOR
Proving time and again that absolutely everything under the sun is genuinely funny, humorist Simeon Joseph Perelman, called Sidney (Sid by his close friends), wrote about the funny business of, well, everything under the sun. He collaborated with the Marx Brothers on the film comedies Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932) and won an Academy Award for his screenplay adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). He also wrote humor for The New Yorker magazine and other publications for decades. One of America’s greatest humorists and a master at short fiction involving word play and satire, Perelman influenced countless other American humorists, including Woody Allen.
S. J. Perelman was born on February 1, 1904, in Brooklyn, New York, the only son of Joseph and Sophie Perelman. The family stumbled from one failed business venture into another until they wound up raising chickens on a farm while running a dry goods store in Providence, Rhode Island. Young Perelman never did outgrow the experience--nor tire of reflecting on it. Years later, he wrote, “A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.”
In Providence, Perelman attended Classical High School and afterward entered Brown University in 1921. Three years later, he became editor of the campus humor magazine The Brown Jug. While his Jewish, lower-middle-class background prevented him from fitting in with most other students, he did befriend a classmate who, like Perelman, had strong literary leanings. That friend turned out to be the future novelist Nathanael West. Perelman became West's brother-in-law when he married Laura West in 1929.
After dropping out of Brown, Perelman moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, where he was strongly influenced in his writing by James Joyce. He often parodied Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style, playing on the meanings of words and mixing in obscure words and references. He loved playing one word against another and used double entendres and literary absurdities. His last piece for the The New Yorker was titled "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cat's Paw" (1979). Never one to shy away from the limelight, he wrote his own introduction for his book, The Best of S. J. Perelman (1947), under the pseudonym Sidney Namlerep (which is "Perelman" spelled backwards).
To say that Perelman was a funny guy is like admitting that caviar is kind of expensive. His references to himself were typically self-deprecatory, as in "Before they made S.J. Perelman, they broke the mold." The names he gave the characters in his stories, as well as the titles of his writings, came from what he called his "lifetime devotion to puns." He carried old newspaper clippings of articles containing funny or complex names in his pockets, and he went so far as to take out an airmail subscription to the London Times simply because he thought the names in that paper were more humorous than those in American papers.
Getting his professional beginning in the 1920s, Perelman worked as a cartoonist and humorist. He included among his friends other great wits, including Robert Benchley and the acid-tongued, acerbic Dorothy Parker, two of the key members of the famed Algonquin Round Table.
With his ribald sense of humor, Perelman's eventual gravitation to Hollywood was a given. His move there in the Thirties changed his life. He soon learned that, while he hated the Hollywood atmosphere, he didn’t feel the same toward the people, whom he hated even more. Still, he worked in Tinsletown for eleven years, mostly as a screen and gag writer, although he preferred writing for the The New Yorker.
While Perelman wrote some longer works, his forte was the short humor essay, many examples of which were less than 1,500 words in length. His pieces were collected in books such as Strictly from Hunger (1937), Westward Ha! (1948), The Ill-Tempered Clavichord (1952), The Road to Miltown or Under the Spreading Atrophy (1957), The Rising Gorge (1961), and Baby It's Cold Inside (1970).
In a film scene that takes place at a speakeasy in the Marx Brothers’ classic Horse Feathers, Pereleman wrote about Groucho trying to gain entrance to the club while Chico stands guard at the door:
CHICO: Who are you?
GROUCHO: I'm fine, thanks, who are you?
CHICO: I'm fine too, but you can't come in unless you give-a the password.
GROUCHO: Well, what is the password?
CHICO: Aw, no. You gotta tell me. Hey, I tell what I do. I give you three guesses. It's the name of a fish.
GROUCHO: Is it Mary?
CHICO: Ha-ha. That's-a no fish.
GROUCHO: She isn't? Well, she drinks like one. Let me see. Is it sturgeon?
CHICO: Hey, you crazy. Sturgeon, he's a doctor cuts you open when-a you sick. Now I give you one more chance.
GROUCHO: I got it. Haddock.
CHICO: That's-a funny. I gotta haddock, too.
GROUCHO: What do you take for a haddock?
CHICO: Well, a-sometimes I take a-aspirin, sometimes I take a-Calamel.
GROUCHO: Say, I'd walk a mile for a Calamel.
CHICO: You mean chocolate calamel. I like that too, but you no guess it. Hey, what's-a matter, you no understand English? You can't come in here unless you say "swordfish." Now, I'll give you one more guess.
Following his wife’s death in 1970, Perelman traveled, wrote, and lived for a time in London. When he finally returned to Manhattan, he moved into the Gramercy Park Hotel. His trademark was a pair of oval, steel-rimmed glasses that he bought in Paris in 1927 and wore for the rest of his life.
About his prolific literary output, Perelman once wrote, "I'm highly irritable, and my senses bruise easily, and when they are bruised, I write."
S. J. Perelman, the man who for decades helped so many people find the lighter side of life, died in New York City on October 17, 1979.
THE ETHICIST
When S. J. Perelman was not concerned with binding his wit and words between two hard covers or slipping them inside the slick pages of The New Yorker magazine, he cut a comforting if not intimidating sight. He stood a dimunitive five-foot-six and outfitted himself in Savile Row haberdashery. He charmed most everyone he met, either with his will or his wit, and he proved to be a congenial fellow--at least until his wife departed this world. He projected as convivial an approach to conversation in person as he did in print.
In digging deep for a humanistic bent to the man, I unearthed a side of Perelman with which a therapist would have had a field day. Defining his glib exterior and overly creative mental acuity would strain any psychiatrist’s credulity. Short on confidence and long on paranoia, Perelman’s marriage at age twenty-five to eighteen-year-old Laura West (née Lorraine Weinstein) was propitious. The two collaborated 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 contributed to numerous film productions--mostly for the money and rarely for the films’ theatrical excellence. The couple remained married until Laura's death in 1970. Perelman never took another wife.
But problems in the couple’s holy union reared their ugly head from the start, mostly due to Sid’s innumerable affairs, including with the notorious Leila Hadley, whom Look magazine described in a 1950 article as "the chic, high-level, in-the-know, celebrity-surrounded career girl that millions of young women dream of becoming in New York." They neglected to say that she was as calculatingly shrewish as she was shrewd. And, apparently somewhat irresistible, not only to Sid but also to five husbands--her last being Henry Luce III--all of whom she buried.
Although Perelman regarded children as a nuisance, he and Laura had two sons. One, Adam, committed several robberies in the mid-1950s, was accused of attempted rape, and ended up in a reformatory for wayward boys. Perleman and his wife may have been less than perfect parents. Instead of spending time worrying about such familial trivialities, Perelman invested his energies in two things: his MG automobile and a mynah bird, both of which “he pampered like babies.”
A devotee of all things English, Perelman’s Anglophilia took a hit in 1972 upon his return to New York following a brief relocation to England. His conclusion? "English life, while very pleasant, is rather bland. I expected kindness and gentility and I found it, but there is such a thing as too much couth."
Although Perelman appeared to be a gentleman’s gentleman to the outside eye, an insider’s gaze may have revealed something entirely different. Groucho Marx, with whom the author had worked on two films and contributed to several others, once said of the writer, "I hated the son-of-a-bitch, and he had a head as big as my desk." In turn, Perelman later bristled at being identified as a writer of Marx Brothers material, insisting that his publishers omit any mention of that fact in publicity material.
Still, despite his fair share of naysayers, Perelman was as loved--or feared--as he was despised. One prominent novelist of the day, Joseph Heller, credited him with being indirectly responsible for the success of his novel, Catch-22, which spawned the television series, Hogan’s Heroes. When first published, Catch-22 was met with lukewarm reviews and indifferent sales. A few months later, Perelman gave an interview to a national publication. When the interviewer asked him if he had read anything funny recently, Perelman--a man “not noted for generosity with his praise”--went to considerable lengths to commend Heller’s book. Following the publication of the interview, sales of that author’s novel boomed.
Unfortunately, as time wound down, so, too, did Perelman’s lifeline. The man who made a nation roar and helped an ailing post-war community mend its wounds issued several self-deprecating indictments such as, “If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I've written, I feel the day hasn't been totally wasted.” and the only slightly more reflective, “The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.”
A warm and caring individual to those few close friends he fostered throughout life; a cold and calculating personality seemingly born of a lesser time and place to others. That was S.J. Perelman in a nutshell. He was an ethicist and a humanist goaded into devoting his life to making others smile or even laugh out loud, even though his genius was never fully recognized until long after his passing, a fate he had once predicted. As the author-humorist once said of himself, “Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.”
Who knows how deeply his ethical persona may have gone in expressing itself if fate had instead dealt from the top.
If you’d like a complimentary review copy of one of my latest books, check out my Website at www.djherda.org, as well as my current publisher at Elektra Press. I’ll look forward to hearing your thoughts! Meanwhile, happy reading!