A monstrous indolence, cheek by jowl with the kind of irascibility displayed by a Vermont postmaster while sorting the morning mail, is perhaps his chief characteristic.
That fanciful profile is from an introduction to The Best of S. J. Perelman and is signed, quite suspiciously, by one Sidney Namlerep ("Perelman" spelled backwards), who could write no more reverently about himself than about anyone or anything else. The real Sidney Jerome Perelman was born Jewish in Brooklyn on February 1, 1904, and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. His father worked, though not steadily, as machinist, dry-goods merchant, and poultry farmer. Perelman's earliest cultural influences were pop novels and movies, which were to provide much of the grist for his satiric mill.
Cartoonist, Satirist, Parodist
Perelman's first ambition was to be a cartoonist, and his earliest work was published in a number of college humor magazines, including the one at his own school, Brown University, which he left in 1924 three credits shy of a degree (trigonometry having thrice thwarted him). He became, in 1926, a regular cartoon contributor to Judge, a top humor magazine of the 1920s and 1930s. One of his more widely reprinted cartoons shows a man confronting a doctor and confessing, "I've got Bright's disease, and he has mine." In another, a woman in a soap commercial enters an apartment and says, "Don't mind us, Verna, we just dropped in to sneer at your towels." The big problem Perelman had as a cartoonist was that his verbal sense was more insistent than his visual, so that the captions kept getting longer and eventually replaced the cartoons entirely.
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