SOURCE: "S. J. Perelman, I Presume," The Spectator, No. 7006, October 5, 1962, p. 519.

In the following review of The Rising Gorge, Flanders comments on the richness of Perelman's humor.

In a world whose serious side is all too insecurely poised over an abyss of absurdity, the humorist can barely avoid hitting the truth from time to time.

But for the workaday he remains an entertaining liar: entertaining only in so far as we know he lies, and he knows we know he knows. So it was in the great American folk myths; in the dream world of Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed and Texas-size; of a simple, peasant people and their tall tales of superhuman strength and cunning. And so it is with S. J. Perelman and the other inverted Munchausens in the New Yorker School of humorists; that glossily urbane group of superbly articulate intellectuals and their unlikely tales of...