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The New Yorker satirist who measured his comic sense against Joyce

Reluctant scriptwriter for the Marx brothers, SJ Perelman had a marvellous ear for language

SJ Perelman: A typical Perelman sketch superimposes the best he has read on to the experiences he, or his adopted persona, finds, and the more absurd, the better. Photograph: Bettmann Archive via Getty

Brian Maye
Sat Oct 30 2021 - 00:00

Lots of people love the Marx Brothers but what SJ Perelman said about them might damage one’s fondness for Groucho et al. Perelman was scriptwriter for Horse Feathers and Monkey Business and his experience of working with them was not a happy one.

“I did two films with them, which in its way is perhaps my greatest distinction in life, because anybody who ever worked on any picture for the Marx brothers said he would rather be chained to a galley oar and lashed at 10-minute intervals until the blood spurted from his frame, than ever work for those sons of bitches again.”

Perelman loved to make words, whether long or short, foreign or domestic, share space in the same densely packed paragraphs

Sidney Joseph Perelman (1904-1979) was one of the great American humorists of his generation. He had various jobs as a cartoonist and writer before finding his true home when he became a satirical writer for the New Yorker. There his comic sense was most unfettered and his delight in language could roam freely, unlimited by the demands of stage or screen: “…With a blow I sent him grovelling. In 10 minutes, he was back with a basket of appetising, fresh-picked grovels.”

He had a marvellous ear for language and loved to make words, whether long or short, foreign or domestic, share space in the same densely packed paragraphs. His strongest influence was James Joyce, “the high comic standard against which he measured his own work,” according to one commentator. Nothing Joyce read was ever lost and Perelman likewise devoured everything from the classics to pulp fiction and wove what he had read into his New Yorker pieces.

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A typical Perelman sketch superimposes the best he has read on to the experiences he, or his adopted persona, finds, and the more absurd the experience, the better.

A fine example would be the piece One Order of Blintzes and Hold the Flimflam, where his protagonist goes to eat at Cooper's Dairy Restaurant on Lower East Side, New York. Reading a Simenon anthology over a bowl of borscht, he settles down to a meal of "beets, sour cream and murder". "Ten minutes into the melange, the first streaks of dawn had silvered the windows of the Police Judiciaire on the Quai des Orfevres, Maigret's brow was furrowed into corduroy over the strangulation of a prostitute in the Rue de la Lappe, and naught but a telltale red smear remained where once was borscht."