I doubt if there is a reader anywhere prepared to read 650 consecutive pages of Perelman at a sitting [as found in The Most of S. J. Perelman and Eastward Ha!]; Perelman's brew is far too heavily seasoned to swallow at a single meal, but an essay a night for three months and the trick is done.
There is a sense in which he is the most negative writer of his era. When I first read A Farewell to Omsk, nearly thirty years ago, and laughed over the passage describing a Russian who 'dislodged a piece of horseradish from his tie and shied it at a passing Nihilist', it escaped me at the time that the Nihilist was Perelman himself, a lampoonist who all his life has clutched gratefully at any wisps of literary horseradish that might come his way, with a view to analysing it in the minutest detail. Advertisements, Show-Biz handouts, ghosted memoirs, the captions to photographs, reported speeches, nothing is too inconsequential for his attention. Were there no bad writing in the world, there would have been no Perelman with his odd gift for disclosing the nature of its rankness. Sometimes, indeed, the target is so idiotic that no satirist's hand is required at all…. Perelman's best targets are those with a kind of daft integrity of their own, Fu Manchu, Tarzan, Cecil B. de Mille, Elinor Glyn, Valentino, where he can work safe in the assumption that his reader is perfectly well acquainted with the unconscious humour of the originals.
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