Sidney Joseph Perelman was born in Brooklyn, New York, to immigrant Joseph and Sophia Perelman. When Perelman was still a child his family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where his father worked as a machinist, a dry goods merchant, and a would-be...

S. J. (Sidney Joseph) Perelman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 1 February 1904 to a father who had immigrated to the United States twelve years earlier. He grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, where, as he told New York Times Magazine interviewer...

S. J. Perelman (1904-1979) was probably the funniest American writer of the 20th century. He was a master of word-play and a cultural parodist without equal. S. J. Perelman was once described in these graphic terms: Under a forehead roughly comparable...

S. J. Perelman: Critical Essays, the first volume of a new series entitled "Studies in Humor," is a commendable beginning, but it may not sustain editor Steven H. Gale's belief that Perelman belongs among such "major humorists" as Geoffrey Chaucer and Mark Twain...

PROVIDENCE - For six months after watching Erich von Stroheim in the film "Foolish Wives," S. J. Perelman once wrote, he exhibited "a maddening tendency to click my heels and murmur 'Bitte?' along with a twitch as though a monocle were screwed into my...

MERE ANARCHYBy Woody Allen Random House, 160 pages, $21.95 THE INSANITY DEFENSE: THE COMPLETE PROSE By Woody Allen Random House, 342 pages, $15.95 Like every other kind of writer, humorists go in and out of fashion. Nobody seems to read Stephen Leacock anymore,...

In the following essay, Yates characterizes Perelman's fictional narrators—types of the literary Little Man—as "sane psychotics."

In the following essay, Gale studies Perelman's subject matter and comic style.

In the following interview, originally published in 1963, Perelman discusses his influences, association with Hollywood, and the seriousness of his humorous style.