[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 imagination…. The truth … is that Perelman couldn't abide chaos or discomfort; the calamities he could handle as a writer were imaginary ones, the comic mountains he dreamt up from serious molehills. Whenever he was questioned about some appalling experience recounted in a book or article, it turned out to have happened to someone else, or been invented….

Apart from the lucrative forays to Hollywood and the occasional, mostly...