Friday, Aug. 4, 2000 | 9:01 a.m.
Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column will make its final appearance Aug. 11. Reach him at [email protected] or 990-2445.
Summer tightens its sweaty grip. The book columnist's head spins; he needs a vacation from his laptop. His car has begun making a still-uncategorizable noise. The teenager of the house has taken his sullen brooding to the next level. There isn't anything the book columnist owns that his new puppies haven't chewed the corners off of. And his new diet has mostly failed to convert mass into energy, but it has ensured him a steady flow of mostly tasteless food.
He could use a good laugh.
Thankfully, S.J. Perelman has come to the rescue, notwithstanding the fact that he is dead. Has been for 21 years. But the paperback elves at Modern Library have repackaged many of the gloriously verbose riffs of this one-time New Yorker star into a fat and lively retrospective. "Most of the Most of S.J. Perelman" ($15.95) is one of the first releases in Modern Library's Humour and Wit series (the others are Nora Ephron's "Crazy Salad," Ben Franklin's "Wit and Wisdom From Poor Richard's Almanack" and "Mark Twain's Library of Humor"). Normally the book columnist would advise readers to flee anything marketed as part of a "humor and wit" series, particularly one whose series "editor" is actor Steve Martin. But in this case, as in so many others, Perelman is an exception.
Shelve this volume in the Recovered Treasures section. Perelman's career, from the 1930s through the 1970s, spanned most of the New Yorker's salad years, when there was an actual audience for sophisticated, literate comedy, which is to say, well before Adam Sandler and the Farrelly brothers. It was a time, in fact, when a writer of sophisticated, literate comedy could actually become something of a public figure, a man the book jacket rightly asserts as "one of the most popular American humorists ever."
You will want credentials. OK. In addition to many very funny books, Perelman also co-wrote two classic Marx Brothers films, "Monkey Business" and "Horse Feathers," and won an Oscar in 1956 as co-author of the script for "Around the World in 80 Days."
The typical Perelman piece is a smorgasbord of fancy wordplay, absurd non sequiturs and loads of inspired silliness. In "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer," a spoof of hard-boiled detective fiction, his tough-guy hero sizes up his sassy secretary. "I stared at her ears, liking the way they were joined to her head. There was something complete about them; you knew they were there for keeps."
However, such excerpts, doled out to shore up the book columnist's argument that Perelman is a funny guy, emphasize punch lines at the expense of the real joy of his writing; it's sheer literary quality. For instance, in the same piece, Perelman's parody of PI lit is dead-on, but that doesn't deprive it of its own small tint of melancholy; beneath the gumshoe's leathery hide, he's a softy. He drops a thousand bucks in crooked cash into his secretary's lap as she's doing crosswords. "Here, buy yourself some stardust," he says, all mock-Bogie cool. "Thanks, I've got my quota," she responds. There's a little charged interplay between them before she asks the big question, "What's an eight-letter word meaning 'sentimental'?" Perelman's last line is perfect, on parodic and literary levels.
" 'Flatfoot, darling,' I said, and went out into the rain."
This sampler includes snatches of the bent travel narratives Perelman was noted for, in this case "Swiss Family Perelman," and nearly 100 pieces whose titles suggest what the reader is in for: "Beat Me, Post-Impressionist Daddy," "Boy Meets Girl Meets Foot," "Caution -- Soft Prose Ahead," "Hell in the Gabardines" and "The Hand That Cradles the Rock."
All of the above notwithstanding, Perelman can be something of an acquired taste or, more accurately, a re-acquired one, because we've largely lost the taste for this sort of literate battiness. His elaborate, ornate language, filled with intentionally florid metaphors and arcane lingo, can momentarily clog up in the contemporary ear. One has to hang in there for a few paragraphs or a few pieces, until the distinctive rhythms of Perelman's prose set in. Then you'll get that good laugh, and eventually realize that the weather isn't so bad, the car noise can be fixed (it's called "power steering fluid," dope), teenagers and dogs will be teenagers and dogs and that the world won't end because you're eating more salad.
Reading matters
Soft-jazz slap fight! You may recall that Kenny G recently dubbed his own playing over Louis Armstrong's track "What a Wonderful World." The awesome and cringe-inducing presumption of that act tweaked the strings of jazz guitarist Pat Metheny. He wrote a scorching rant on a website, and it was picked up by Harper's magazine and printed in the August issue.
He begins diplomatically enough, noting that he's always had certain differences with Mr. G, but Metheny builds to an eloquent roar of indignance over this musical grave-defiling. I think he speaks for all of us when he barks about G's "lame-ass, jive, pseudo-bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped-out, (expletive deleted)-up playing ..."
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