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.

In the following review of Eastward Ha!, Wood recounts Perelman's skill at pun and wordplay and offers many examples of his wit.

In the following review of The Last Laugh, originally published in 1981, Sheed examines the ingredients of Perelman's humor, but remarks that this volume lach some of the vigor of Perelman's earlier work.

In the following review, Crowther surveys the stories of That Old Gang O' Mine: The Early and Essential S. J. Perelman.

In the following reviews of The Most of S. J. Perelman and Baby, It's Cold Inside, originally published in 1958 and 1970 respectively, Welty admires Perelman's wit and cast of humorous characters.

In the following review of Baby, It's Cold Inside, Kanfer comments on Perelman's influences and literary influence, as well as the aim of his humor.

In the following review of The Last Laugh, Brickman observes of Perelman, "his genius defies criticism."

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

In the following review, Maloney studies Perelman's Keep It Crisp, calling the book "superb."

In the following review of The Road to Miltown, Parker proclaims "Mr. Perelman stands alone in this day of humorists."

In the following review of Eastward Ha!, Theroux examines some of the objects of Perelman's travel satire and calls the humorist "incomparable."

In the following review, Welty positively assesses the satire, parody, and wordplay of Perelman's Crazy Like a Fox.

In the following review of The Most of S. J. Perelman and Eastward Ha!, Fantoni writes approvingly of Perelman's humorous use of language.

In the following review of The Last Laugh, Teachout finds Perelman's collection lacking the energy and balance of some of his earlier works.

In the following review, the unsigned critic recounts Perelman's life and brand of humor.

In the following review of Baby, It's Cold Inside, Freedman finds Perelman's humor, though funny, largely reminiscent of a bygone era.

In the following review of Crazy Like a Fox, Sugrue characterizes Perelman as "the funniest man in America."

In his own country, Perelman was latterly in danger of being cast as little more than a talented eye-witness, wittily recalling the supposed greats of Broadway, Hollywood and the New Yorker. And this was no doubt one of the reasons why we in Britain saw so much of him during the Seventies…. The very violence with which Perelman's prose lurches from the Bowery into the Rare Books Room of the British Museum and back again implies in itself that there is a conscious and moderate way to treat lang...

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

In the following review of Vinegar Puss, Theroux calls Perelman "a shaping force of comedy " and offers the book high praise.

In the following review of Listen to the Mocking Bird, Gilroy describes Perelman the critic, the world traveler, and the satirist.

S. J. Perelman, it turns out, left behind four chapters of an autobiography when he died in 1979. He planned to call it "The Hindsight Saga," a perelmaniacal spin off "The Forsythe Saga." These bits of memoir, published for the first time in "The Last Laugh," are the tailpiece to a collection of 17 of Perelman's comic sketches for The New Yorker. Even in its fragmentary state, "The Hindsight Saga" strikes me as the best thing Perelman ever wrote...

Perelman was never restrained but always reticent. You might think his posthumous book, The Last Laugh, would break new ground, especially since it includes a few sketches from his proposed but incomplete autobiography. Here, the avid Perelman reader might think, we shall get down to the nitty-gritty of life. But the sketches of Nathanael West, his brother-in-law, and of Dorothy Parker, whom he knew for years and years, are curiously impersonal and might have been written (as far as emotional intensity is c...

In the following review, Sherman discusses the subject matter of The Dream Department, and describes the volume as "lunatic and delightful."

[Only] now, reading The Last Laugh, which appears a year and a half after Perelman's death, have I considered the real, concealed value of his work. Parents could do far worse than to leave The Most of S. J. Perelman lying around the house, because its author demonstrates that it is possible to be funny and write well at the same time, a lesson that is not to be taken lightly in an age when so much humor—whether in print, the movies, or on television—has segregated itself from the liter...

In the following review, Nordell comments on the "verbal vaudeville" of Perelman's writing.

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 piec...

People who came to Perelman late commonly had difficulty understanding the zeal of earlier converts and, by chance, I could see why; I myself read his books in the wrong order and underwent the strange experience of being somewhat tired of him before I became a fan. A bit too mechanical, I thought of his later stuff. To my mind almost all his best work is crammed into one volume—Crazy Like a Fox, first published in 1944 but spanning his oeuvre from 1931 to then. This was an awkward belief to hold dur...

Humor to me, Heaven help me, takes in many things. There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it. There must be some lagniappe in the fact that the humorist has read something written before 1918. There must be, in short, S. J. Perelman. Mr. Perelman stands alone in...

In the following review, the critic observes that Perelman's jokes, while "imaginative and versatile, " on occasion fail, becoming little more than mechanical gags.

S. J. Perelman is the most durable and, over the long haul, possibly the most brilliant of that familiar group of humorists whose wit fructified in the Twenties and Thirties and who found a spiritual home in the pages of The New Yorker. His new collection, "The Rising Gorge" (perhaps the most revealing of all Perelman book titles), substantiates the well-established opinion that the Master's forte is without question a biting, sardonic prose style, at times almost Dadaistic in its empha...

[By the early 1930s Perelman] had found the mature style and the form (the five-page sketch) that he would never desert…. The style eventually proved somewhat inflexible, as the autobiographical material [in The Last Laugh] shows. He became incapable of dealing directly with his experience in writing. His travel pieces are almost entirely fiction: he moved around the world mainly on the tourist circuit, the journeys being as much a way of assuaging his chronic restlessness as of stirring his imaginat...

In the following review, the critic notes Perelman's wit, and places him among the top of American humorists.

What I predict now could really be put in the form of a nomination: that S. J. Perelman be declared a living national treasure. This would be a good time for it. He has a new book today ["Baby, It's Cold Inside"] and we need the treasure…. Mr. Perelman has always taken aim at the same target. His aim is perfect, but human folly of course is deathless. It just changes shape. (p. 1)

In the following review, the unsigned critic remarks that the pieces in Perelman's Chicken Inspector No. 23 are "as furiously and fluently disenchanted as ever."

In the following review of The Ill-Tempered Clavichord, Robinson mentions the usual targets of Perelman's satirical wit.

In the following review, Kupferberg calls Perelman's Home Companion, "a quintessence of Perelman. "

Reader, S. J. Perelman has struck again. "Great, fatuous booby that I was"—these are the words of Perelman himself—"I imagined advertising would be destroyed from the outside. It won't; it's going to bubble and heave and finally expire in the arms of two nuns, like Oscar Wilde." Not if S. J. Perelman can help it, it won't. In fact, here lies the body before us now, with a sign left pinned to its jacket saying "Crazy Like a Fox."

In the following laudatory review, the unsigned critic examines Perelman's humorous narratives.

Most of the sketches in [The Rising Gorge] have appeared before, in The New Yorker…. [Mr. Perelman] deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with James Thurber, Peter De Vries and other celebrated contributors to that magazine. In common with them he is high-spirited, imaginative and versatile. Puns, parodies, pratfalls are all in his compass…. He is, like Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West, a connoisseur of the bizarre and the corrupt, the Hollywood-Broadway-Miami axis, places that have a...

S. J. Perelman is one of those humorists—he prefers to think of himself as a writer of "the sportive essay"—who hits the reader on the after-beat. He catches up to you going away from the joke, innocently unsuspecting, with the cream pie of the jest already smeared across your face. He puts you into stitches by a kind of kint one, Perel two technique…. The long fuse Perelman strings to his jokes is quintessentially verbal. He uses syntax the way a silent comedian uses the ...

Of the three authors who form the trinity of American humour—Benchley and Thurber being the other two—Perelman is the most complete. His range is wider, and no one gets a piece off the ground with greater panache and keeps it going…. Thinking about Perelman instead of just laughing at him is tough work. There is a true irreverence in his early years [as evidenced in The Most of S. J. Perelman] which is wildly funny and closer to Private Eye at its best than the New Yorker or Punch, wher...

Reading S. J. Perelman's latest book "The Road to Miltown," the professional humorist is apt to experience sensations similar to those known to pianists who listen to an Art Tatum recording. He feels, in other words, like giving up. Perelman is simply too good. The suspicion arises that there is no real Perelman any more, but that some diabolically ingenious technician has succeeded in equipping a Univac machine with a complete supply of the world's literary clichés, a voc...

Last year, entirely on his own, Perelman perpetrated "Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge," a fine, mad book…. And now he has produced from his lunatic depths a second and better volume, "Parlor, Bedlam and Bath."… The book is good, though it falls occasionally into a bog. Essentially it is like nothing else that we know, in spite of passages and attitudes that remind us of McEvoy, Sullivan, Stewart, Lardner, Benchley, Groucho Marx, and Joe Cook. Anyone to whom this lis...

Perelman has every right to be a bit bushed by now, forty-one years and eighteen books after his debut, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, which crashed into public notice coincidentally with the stock market. Yet aside from the title, which he seems to have thought of in about five minutes while lying in a hammock, Baby, It's Cold Inside (remember that song?) shows the Bubba of Bucks County as alert to cliché, as pugnacious to pretense, as frenetic and fallible as ever…. The manic mixtur...

A very easy move of a certain kind of middle-brow criticism for the past 40 years has been to call anything you don't understand surrealist, and I dare say there are people who would call [Perelman] surreal. I don't think so in the least. I think that his metamorphic vision, that is his ability to take some idiotic phrase, some idiotic situation and suddenly let it happen in the full garishness of its ramification, does all come in one sense from the 'Circe' episode of Ulysses. I...

As a humorist, Perelman is a pixie. He walks you down the garden path of simple declarative sentences, then smacks you with a load of double-jointed linguistics. He hits you on the shin with syntax, and when you double over, he steps in to clout you over the head with a hidden hieroglyphic. If you are a fan dating back to "Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge," you'll find ["Westward, Ha!"], in these days of global consciousness, gives Perelman nothing less than a whole world t...

There is a certain uniformity in the Perelman pieces—in the craftsmanship, in the construction. They invariably start off with a highly challenging introduction, a ludicrous statement or something that is made in the very first sentence, that so intrigues the reader that you have to follow through to find out just how this nonsense could possibly end up. It's my conviction that Perelman must labour very hard on his introductions because they must be difficult to do, but they're superb a...

I discovered [Perelman] when I was in high school. I came across certain pieces that he had written and I immediately was stunned by them. I thought they were just the best and the funniest things that I had ever read, and not at all heavy-handed, which most humour writers are…. Perelman … is just as light as a soufflé. What happens to you when you read Perelman and you're a young writer is fatal because his style seeps into you. He's got such a pronounced, overwhelming co...