Perelman SJ
NAME: Perelman, S. J.
ACHIEVEMENTS: S. J. Perelman was once considered "the funniest man alive." His gift for wordplay made him a master parodist and helped shape twentieth-century American humor.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: born Simeon Joseph Perelman, changed to Sidney Joseph Perelman shortly after his birth
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: 1 February 1904 in Brooklyn, NY
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: 17 October 1979 in New York, NY, at age 75
DISCIPLINE: literature
FIELD: humorist
LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: father was Joseph Perelman and mother was Sophia Charren, both Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s.
SIBLINGS: a sibling that died before he was born
SPOUSE: married Laura West on 1929 June 20th
CHILDREN: son Adam, born in 1936; daughter Abby Laura, born in 1938
EDUCATION: attended Brown University 1921-5, never graduated because he couldn’t pass trigonometry but received an honorary doctorate of letters in June of 1965.
MAJOR WORK:
Writings:
1929, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge
1930, Parlor, Bedlam and Bath (With Quentin Reynolds)
1937, Strictly from Hunger
1940, Look Who's Talking, Random House
1943, The Dream Department, Random House
1944, The Best of S. J. Perelman, published as Crazy like a Fox in 1947
1946, Keep It Crisp
1947, Acres and Pains
1947, Westward Ha! or, Around the World in Eighty Clichés
1949, Listen to the Mocking Bird
1950, The Swiss Family Perelman
1951, A Child's Garden of Curses (contains Crazy like a Fox, Keep It Crisp, and Acres and Pains)
1952, The Ill-Tempered Clavichord
1954, Hold That Christmas Tiger!
1955, Perelman's Home Companion: A Collector's Item (the Collector Being S. J. Perelman) of 36 Otherwise Unavailable Pieces by Himself
1957, The Road to Miltown; or, Under the Spreading Atrophy, published as Bite on the Bullet; or, Under the Spreading Atrophy in 1957
1958, The Most of S. J. Perelman
1961, The Rising Gorge
1966, Chicken Inspector No. 23
1970, Baby, It's Cold Inside
1975, Vinegar Puss
1977, Eastward Ha!
1981, The Last Laugh
1984, That Old Gang o' Mine: The Early and Essential S. J. Perelman
1987, Don't Tread on Me: The Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman, edited by Prudence Crowther
Regularly contributed to the New Yorker, 1931-39; also contributed essays to Holiday, Travel and Leisure, McCall's, Saturday Evening Post, Country Book, Contact and Life. About 200 of Perelman's manuscripts are in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.
Plays
1932, The Third Little Show (revue, contributed sketches)
1932, Walk a Little Faster (revue, contributed sketches with Robert MacGunigle)
1933, All Good Americans (comedy, with Laura Perelman)
1934, Even Stephen (satire, with Nathanael West, never produced)
1940, Two Weeks with Pay (revue, contributed sketches)
1942, The Night Before Christmas (comedy, with Laura Perelman)
1944, One Touch of Venus (comedy, with Ogden Nash, adapted into film in 1948)
1946, Sweet Bye and Bye (comedy, with Al Hirschfield)
1961-3, The Beauty Part (two-act comedy, with Ogden Nash)
Screenplays:
1931, Monkey Business (With Will B. Johnstone and Arthur Sheekman)
1932, Horse Feathers (With Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby)
1933, Sitting Pretty (With Jack McGowan and Lou Breslow)
1934, Paris Interlude (With Laura Perelman, adapted from their play All Good Americans)
1936, Florida Special (With Laura Perelman, David Boehm, and Marguerite Roberts)
1939, Ambush (With Laura Perelman)
1939, Boy Trouble (With Laura Perelman)
1940, The Golden Fleecing (With Laura Perelman and Marion Parsonnet)
1942, Larceny, Inc. (with Laura Perelman, based on his play The Night before Christmas)
1956, Around the World in Eighty Days (With James Poe and John Farrow)
Television Scripts:
1957, The Changing Ways of Love (CBS)
1957-9, Aladdin (NBC)
1957-9, Omnibus series (NBC)
1963, Elizabeth Taylor's London (CBS)
LIFE AND TIMES:
S. J. Perelman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 1 February, 1904 to Russian Jewish immigrants. He grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, where his family ran an unsuccessful dry goods store and poultry farm. Though he won a writing contest at age 13, Perelman was more interested in becoming a cartoonist than a writer.
He drew all through high school, and at Brown University, he contributed cartoons to the campus humor magazine, Brown Jug. His work was heavily influenced by Ralph Barton and John Held, Jr. In his senior year Perelman became the Jug's editor. When he left Brown in 1925 without receiving his degree, he was offered a job as a cartoonist with Judge, a popular weekly humor magazine.
While at Brown, Perelman befriended a fellow student by the name of Nathan Weinstein. In 1926, Weinstein legally changed his name to Nathanael West, and became known as a novelist and screenwriter. West’s sister, Lorraine, also changed her name -- to Laura West. According to their marriage certificate, she and Perelman were married on 20 June, 1929.
In 1929, Perelman published his first book, Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge, a collection of stories mostly republished from Judge. <a fan was> Groucho Marx*, who received a copy through the publisher’s publicity department, liked it so much that he wrote a jacket blurb for it: “From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.” Over the next 18 years, Perelman would publish 20+ collections of writing, most of which was first published in popular magazines such as the New Yorker and Saturday Evening Post.
In the early 1930s, Perelman crossed paths again with Marx, who asked him to write a radio script with cartoonist Will Johnstone. Perelman and Johnstone pitched a vague storyline with the four Marx Brothers as stowaways on a trans-Atlantic liner, and Groucho said, “This is too good to waste on a radio show, it's going to be our next picture.” Monkey Business (1931) would become the third Marx Brothers movie. In 1932, Perelman also co-scripted their fourth movie, Horse Feathers, with Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby.
Perelman has said that the sole motivation for his connection with Hollywood was money -- "In essence it was an experience no worse than playing the piano in a house of call.” He was equally bitter about his relationship with the Marx Brothers – “I did two films with them, which in its way is perhaps my greatest distinction in life, because anybody who ever worked on any picture for the Marx Brothers said he would rather be chained to a galley oar and lashed at ten-minute intervals than ever work for these sons-of-bitches again.” However, up until 1964, Perelman and Groucho had maintained a publicly friendly relationship. It is not known what led to their falling out.
Meanwhile, Perelman tried his hand at writing for the stage. His first play, Walk a Little Faster, co-written with Robert MacGunigle, opened in New York in 1932. Of the eight plays that Perelman wrote by himself or in collaboration with others, One Touch of Venus became the most popular. Co-written with <worked with> Nash*, with music by <worked with> Weill*, the play opened in New York on 7 October 1943. In 1948 a movie version based on Perelman's screenplay was released.
Acres and Pains, published in 1947, was the first of Perelman's thematic collections. Instead of a series of unrelated essays written over several years, all of the stories are set on Perelman's farm in Pennsylvania. Perelman's definition of a farm is "an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city." In short, rural life is not for civilized man.
Westward Ha! or Around the World in Eighty Clichés was published in 1948. Another thematic collection, it recounts his first of several trips around the world. In 1956, Perelman, along with cowriters James Poe and John Farrow, received the New York Film Critics Award and an Oscar for best screenplay for Around the World in Eighty Days, based on the novel by <adapted work of> Verne*. Perelman did not remember the experience fondly. In "Disquiet, Please, We're Turning!" from Vinegar Puss (1975), Perelman called producer Michael Todd "a cheap chiseler reluctant to disgorge royalties."
In 1969, Perelman asked his wife for a divorce. She agreed, but before it could take place, she died of breast cancer on 10 April, 1970. No service was held. Perelman immediately sold the farm and all their possessions and moved to London. The move was an attempt to escape from "insanity and violence" and "twice breathed air."
In London, Perelman sublet a flat but didn’t stay home for long. He took his secretary, Dianne Baker, on an 80-day trip to retrace Phileas Fogg’s trek in Around the World in Eighty Days, but fired her in Hong Kong. Baker published her account of the trip, “Halfway Around the World in 40 Days with S. J. Perelman” in the May 1972 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
It painted an unflattering portrait of Sid as a testy man who spent most of his time sulking in his hotel room. Other accounts described a simple case of clashing personalities. In his own version, “Around the Bend in Eighty Days”, later republished in Vinegar Puss (1975), Perelman blamed everything on Mrs. Baker’s boyfriend who “had been wooing her assiduously throughout our journey – indeed, had proposed by cable in Singapore, importuning her to curtail the trip and join him at the altar.”
After returning to London, Perelman socialized with British intellectuals but seemed rattled about his many engagements and would often arrive late or not at all. Friends speculated Laura’s death affected him more than he would admit.
When the invitations stopped arriving, and Perelman began condemning the British. In 1972, he moved back to New York, where he socialized with old friends, dated many women, and rarely stayed home. He regretted the impulsive sale of his farm but knew Leila Hadley, wife of the new owner, and the couple welcomed his visits.
Perelman died of a heart attack at home.
ASSESSMENT: Writer whose gift for wordplay helped shape twentieth-century American humor.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: He met <met> T.S. Eliot*.
He was influenced by <influenced by> Beerbohm*, <influenced by> E.M. Forster*, <influenced by> Thoreau*, <influenced by> Joyce*, and <influenced by> Mencken*.
ONELINER: S.J. Perleman, one of the great humorists.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Clark, R. (ed.) (1986). Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 44: American Screenwriters, Second Series. “S. J. Perelman”, by Christopher Adcock. The Gale Group, 1986.
Hermann, D., S.J. Perelman: A Life, G. P. Putnam’s Sons,New York. 1986
“S.J. Perelman”, Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2000.
Trachtenberg, S (ed.) (1982). Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 11: American Humorists, 1800-1950. “S. J. Perelman”, by Steven. H. Gale. The Gale Group.