S. J. Perelman Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Sidney Joseph Perelman, known professionally as S. J. Perelman, was born in 1904 in Brooklyn and grew up largely in Providence, Rhode Island. He developed an early fascination with comic writing and cartooning and, at Brown University, wrote for the campus humor magazine The Brown Jug. Although he left Brown without a degree, the apprenticeship in collegiate humor and the voracious reading he undertook there gave him his signature blend of highbrow vocabulary and lowbrow targets, a style that would become his hallmark.

Finding a Voice in Print
Perelman began publishing in the late 1920s in popular humor outlets of the day, including Judge and Life (the humor magazine of that name), before establishing himself at The New Yorker. Under editor Harold Ross, and later William Shawn, Perelman crafted the brief, barbed comic essays that the magazine termed "casuals". These pieces skewered advertising patter, gadget mania, pulp plots, and the breathless promises of American consumer culture. He wrote parodies that could pivot from a faux travelogue to a hard-boiled thriller in a sentence, employing an ornate but precise diction, wild metaphors, and a gift for detonating cliches. Alongside contemporaries such as James Thurber and E. B. White, he helped define the magazine's interwar and postwar comic tone, though his satire tended to be denser and more linguistically acrobatic.

Hollywood and the Marx Brothers
Hollywood came calling during the early 1930s. Perelman went west to work at Paramount, where he contributed to the Marx Brothers vehicles Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932). The anarchic timing of Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo aligned perfectly with Perelman's taste for verbal ricochets, and his dialogue helped frame Groucho's withering asides and improbable similes. Yet Perelman found studio life dispiriting, and his later essays would lampoon the jargon, hierarchies, and arbitrary rewrites that defined the system. His stint nonetheless left an enduring mark: his Hollywood satires were funnier for having been written by someone who had survived the sausage factory, and the Marx films brought his name beyond the literary world.

Books, Stages, and Notable Collaborations
Perelman's books gathered his magazine pieces into volumes that showed the breadth of his targets. Collections such as Crazy Like a Fox, Acres and Pains, The Ill-Tempered Clavichord, and The Most of S. J. Perelman preserved his best-known work and kept it in print for successive generations. Acres and Pains, drawn from episodes at his Pennsylvania farm, turned gentleman farming into a comic war of attrition with weather, contractors, and pests.

He was active on the stage as well. With poet Ogden Nash, Perelman co-wrote the book for the Broadway musical One Touch of Venus, set to music by Kurt Weill. The collaboration combined Nash's nimble wordplay with Perelman's tart narrative sensibility and remains one of the classic American musical-comedy concoctions of the 1940s.

Another important partnership was with the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. Together they produced Westward Ha!, a satirical travel chronicle adorned with Hirschfeld's sinuous drawings. Perelman's prose and Hirschfeld's line were an ideal pairing: the text tightened the screw of absurdity while the illustrations widened the grin. The book grew out of assignments that sent them across the Pacific and Asia, and it showcased Perelman's ability to deflate the pretensions of both travel brochures and his own traveler's misadventures.

Screenwriting After the Studios
Perelman returned to screenwriting with considerable success in the 1950s. He shared the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Around the World in 80 Days (1956) with James Poe and John Farrow. The production, overseen by the flamboyant producer Mike Todd, was extravagant in scope and personnel, qualities that both dazzled and irritated Perelman. If Hollywood remained, for him, a land of overstatement and compromise, the Oscar signaled that even amid spectacle his comic intelligence could be made to count.

Family Ties and Personal Loss
Perelman's marriage to Laura West connected him to another major American writer: her brother was the novelist Nathanael West. The two men became brothers-in-law and friends, and, for a time in the 1930s, professional colleagues in Hollywood. West's sudden death in an automobile accident in 1940, alongside his wife Eileen McKenney, was a personal blow to Perelman and a puncturing loss to the world of American letters. That family connection, and the Wests' bracing, unsentimental humor, formed part of the emotional landscape in which Perelman worked.

Perelman was famously strict with his own prose, pruning and reworking drafts to maintain a hair-trigger precision. Away from his desk he could be testy, but his irritations often became fodder for comic set pieces: baffling gadgets, officious clerks, botched renovations, and the paper blizzard of modern life all found their way into his work. Periods spent on his Pennsylvania property deepened his store of material and grounded the domestic comedies that readers cherished.

Style, Method, and Influence
Perelman's comedy was sonic as much as conceptual. He delighted in malapropisms, scrambled idioms, outrageous coinages, and sudden shifts of register. He was a virtuoso of parody: detective fiction, self-help manuals, travel guides, and romantic melodramas were all grist for his mill. Yet the jokes did more than twit superficialities. Perelman's targets were the credulity encouraged by marketing, the inflation of language in public life, and the way mass culture could flatten experience into slogans. In The New Yorker's pages his pieces often appeared amid the calm of serious reporting, and the contrast made his eruptions of nonsense, and the small recognitions tucked inside them, feel bracing.

His influence spread across later American humor, from magazine writing to stage comedy and film. Performers and writers who prized exact timing and ornate phrasing found in Perelman a model for how to make language itself the star. At the same time, he remained an exemplar within The New Yorker tradition, a figure who demonstrated that short forms could be engineered as precisely as sonnets and detonated as neatly as fireworks.

Later Years and Legacy
Perelman continued to publish in the postwar decades, assembling new collections and seeing his older work reissued for new readers. The anthology The Most of S. J. Perelman solidified his reputation and kept in circulation the pieces that had helped shape modern American comic prose. He remained a presence around The New Yorker during the long stewardship of William Shawn, contributing work that sustained his voice even as tastes changed.

He died in 1979, leaving behind a body of writing that is at once meticulous and merrily unhinged. Associates such as Harold Ross, William Shawn, Ogden Nash, Al Hirschfeld, the Marx Brothers, and his fellow screenwriters on Around the World in 80 Days mark the constellation of figures around him; family connections to Nathanael West linked him to another pillar of American satire. Taken together, his essays, screenplays, and theatrical work make a case for comic prose as a high art, one that can fillet pomposity and console the bedeviled reader in the same paragraph. Even for those who have never paged through a New Yorker from the 1930s, echoes of Perelman's timing and phrasing can be heard in the durable forms of American humor he helped to perfect.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by J. Perelman, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Truth - Learning - Free Will & Fate.