This legendary Jewish humorist was ‘the most negative writer of his era’ — can he still speak to ours?
S.J. Perelman, 1977 Photo by Getty Images
By Benjamin Ivry April 17, 2024
With the publication of new editions of books by Sidney Joseph Perelman in the prestigious Library of America (LOA) series, one might be inclined to ask whether Perelman is really a humorist for the ages.
Following up on a 2011 LOA anthology of Perelman’s work, the volumes, Crazy Like a Fox and Cloudland Revisited, feature wordplay inspired by banalities of American popular publishing and film culture. Perelman was born in New York and raised in Rhode Island, where a boyhood friend was the Hebrew scholar Israel James Kapstein. Perelman’s father Joseph failed as a grocer and chicken farmer, two professions which this collection informs us were “classic Jewish occupations” of the time.
Seeking inspiration in the detritus of American pop culture, the younger Perelman emerged with gems often enhanced by inserting Yiddishkeit where it was least expected. The title of his first book, Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge (1929) had nothing to do with its contents, early writings from his days at Brown University, never subsequently reprinted. Perelman’s early publications were from an era when a Jewish-sounding name, like Dawn Ginsbergh, or Ivy Nudnick, another of his inventions, was enough to elicit chortles from his readership.
At Brown, his Jewish mentor Percy Marks, an English professor, had been fired for writing a satirical novel, The Plastic Age (1924), about student life. The historian Stephen Whitfield observed that although a college dropout, Perelman was perhaps the sole significant contributor to American Jewish humor who benefited from much formal education.
From this intellectual standpoint, his “Waiting for Santy” (1936), a parody of a work by Jewish playwright Clifford Odets, transmutes New York Jewish experience into romantic dialogue from a lovelorn swain: “You’re the moon rising over Mosholu Parkway; you’re a two weeks’ vacation at Camp Nitgedaiget!”
A vacation resort for Jewish progressives founded in Dutchess County, New York, Camp Nitgedaiget’s Yiddish name translated as “no worries.” In “Waiting for Santy,” Perelman’s lovebirds indulge in a “very slow waltz… unmindful that the phonograph is playing ‘Cohen on the Telephone.’” A 1913 recording by American Jewish comedian Joe Hayman (born Hyman), “Cohen on the Telephone” found comedy in confusion due to Jewish immigration pronunciation of English, combined with primitive phone technology.
Although often worried, Perelman may have calmed his angst by adding Biblical allusions, as in the mock-hardboiled “Hit Him Again, He’s Sober.” In this narrative, two bruisers are dubbed “Gog and Magog,” a reference to the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible.
More Jewish minutiae appear in Perelman’s stage play The Beauty Part (1962), in which a no-nonsense detective reports that a subject being tailed went to a “dairy restaurant on Second Avenue” and consumed a “plate of soup containing kreplach.”
Many of Perelman’s best concoctions are complex, requiring exegesis. One such relies on reader familiarity with the quest by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert for the right word (le mot juste); Perelman duly invented a grammarian named Moe Juste.
Even more arcanely, in “Footnote On The Yellow Peril” (1937), the reader needs to be aware that a real-life Chinese warlord named Feng Yuxiang was known as the Christian General to his contemporaries for his zeal to convert his troops; Perelman notes that Feng is “called ‘the Christian Marshal’ (as opposed to Feng, the Jewish Marshal, I guess).”
This dated whimsy can be tiresome, as the English Jewish jazz saxophonist and biographer Benny Green commented in a 1976 article in The Spectator. Green alleged that Perelman was no satirist, but rather a “cunning master of pastiche” who “ridicules the bad because it is the bad he prefers.” After idolizing Perelman from 1945 onward, Green found his effortful wordplay in each new collection “marginally less readable.”
Two years later, Green concluded in the same periodical that Perelman’s writing was best sampled “in small portions” because “we sense the sheer indigestibility of the whole.” Two decades earlier, in 1953, critic Morris Freedman had already kvetched that Perelman’s work made for “exasperatingly slow reading”:
“On each page you have to plow through a syntax and vocabulary as self-consciously baroque as Sir Thomas Browne’s. More than one sketch at a sitting cloys your senses… the strain, the near violent tension of a Perelman production leaves you limp.”
Perelman’s characters were deliberately superficial, mere props for punning. As what Green called “the most negative writer of his era,” Perelman spoofed advertisements, publicity handouts, ghosted memoirs, photograph captions, or any text that might spark a verbal fantasia, redolent with mishegas.
Beyond these issues, Perelman’s personality does not help attract readers today. Perelman endured real tragedy in his life, including the early death in 1940 of his brother-in-law Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein), a novelist who probably outdid him for the title of “most negative writer of his era.” Decades of working with celebrated Jewish entertainers left Perelman what he described in the title of another collection as a Vinegar Puss. Though he scripted two Marx Brothers films, he loathed Groucho Marx. And in a 1955 letter to a friend, Perelman deemed producer Mike Todd (born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen) even more representative of “all that’s most revolting in human behavior” than the Jewish actor George Jessel, while working with the former on the film Around the World in Eighty Days.
Although long out of print, a 1981 biography and 1987 selection of Perelman’s letters further imprinted the image of a grim, sour personality. A happier legacy is found in his travel books like Westward Ha! (1948) with the exultant artist Al Hirschfeld, which deserve reprint. Wherever he roamed, Perelman’s writing gained vigor from the Jewish tradition. As he told interviewers from The Paris Review in 1963:
“There are nineteen words in Yiddish that convey gradations of disparagement, from a mild, fluttery helplessness to a state of downright, irreconcilable brutishness. All of them can be usefully employed to pinpoint the kind of individuals I write about.”
Here, as so often, Perelman was speaking in earnest. After he died in 1979, his editor William Shawn described Perelman as “utterly serious, but his medium simply was humor.” Perelman unsmilingly located himself in the often-devastating cultural milieu of modern American Jewish history. He collected artworks by the left wing painter Ben Shahn.
These included a 1933 portrait of Governor James Rolph, Jr. of California, known as “Governor Lynch” for publicly praising the citizens of San Jose after the lynching that year of the murderers of Brooke Hart, a local Jewish department store heir. Profoundly unsettled in a violent era, Perelman preferred looking backward; he even wrote a preface for a 1968 reprint of the 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue.
In terms of Perelman’s literary legacy, academic researchers have analyzed his work soberly. The cultural historian Bill Hug intriguingly suggests that despite Woody Allen’s vehement claims of influence from Perelman, the zesty nihilism of Mel Brooks’ films may be closest to the essential spirit of Sidney Joseph Perelman.
Yet on the question of whether Perelman’s books will continue to attract readers in future, any Jewish humorist who relies on footnoted explanations, however laudatory, may experience some trouble with posterity.
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