Life & Wisdom Quote by S. J. Perelman

Perelman takes a machete to the salon version of romance and then makes you laugh at the mess. The first half of the line is pure parody: "the dying moan of a distant violin" is the sort of prepackaged pathos you’d expect in a weepy film score or a drawing-room novel, where love exists mostly to be suffered elegantly. It’s not just sentimental; it’s theatrical, outsourced to art that tells you what to feel.

Then he yanks the scene into a bedroom with "the triumphant twang of a bedspring". The joke lands because it’s vulgar in the old, literal sense: it returns love to the body, to noise, to embarrassment, to momentum. "Triumphant" is doing sly work here. He’s not merely swapping romance for sex; he’s crowning the unglamorous sound effect as a victory anthem, suggesting that consummation, clumsiness, and desire are more honest than cultivated longing. The bedspring twang is comedic because it punctures the fantasy of grace, but it’s also oddly tender: love is real enough to creak.

Context matters. Perelman wrote in a midcentury America saturated with mass-media romance narratives and a growing consumer culture of feelings. His signature move was to expose how language inflates experience into cliché. This line performs that critique in miniature: it weaponizes contrast (violin vs. bedspring, distant vs. immediate) to argue that love isn’t an aesthetic pose. It’s a lived event, loud and unignorable, and the punchline is that the “low” truth out-sings the “high” lie.