SOURCE: "'You Mustn't Say Things Like That'," in The Nation, Vol. 187, No. 18, November 29, 1958, pp. 410-12.

In the following excerpted review, Gibson lauds Perelman as a humorist skilled in the use of language, but not as a great writer.

The publication last month of The Most of S. J. Perelman, should remind readers that we have in our own country, a comic writer who has been carrying on a consistent and eloquent attack on dead language since about the time Mr. [Kingsley] Amis was born. Perelman has been quoted to the effect that Joyce is the greatest comic writer of our time, and that observation helps to suggest the particular quality of his own humor. It is a humor, richly represented in this handsome collection, that depends on the strictest sensitivity to the corniness of contemporary public language, laced (as he would say) with wild juxtapositions of traditional literary...