You Need To Read S.J. Perelman
The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere.
I loathe writing. On the other hand I'm a great believer in money.
If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I've written, I feel the day hasn't been totally wasted.
I am a huge fan of S.J. Perelman. I started reading him in college when I found out he was one of the writers on Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, two of my favorite Marx Brothers films.
One New Years Eve when I was still in college and living in LA one of the local TV stations had a Marx Brothers marathon and showed all of their films back to back. Of course I stayed in that night and fell asleep on the couch around 3 am.
Perelman didn’t just write screenplays, he wrote five original plays on Broadway from 1932-1963, and his short stories for The New Yorker are legendary. I have no idea how many volumes of short stories he actually wrote, according to the internet, well over 25. That is a lot of writing.
If travel has taught me nothing more, and it certainly has, it's this: you never know when some trifling incident, utterly without significance, may pitchfork you into adventure or, by the same token, may not.
Another one of my favorite films is Around the World in Eighty Days, with a screenplay by Perelman, James Poe and John Farrow. (Based on the book by Jules Verne, but I don’t recall Verne’s book being so damn funny.)
I remember watching the original film (with David Niven) in the theater. I believe it was shot in wide-screen format as I remember the beauty of far off places that it captured. Please don’t ruin my memories and tell me it was all shot on a set. I think that might have been one of the first films that introduced me to the notion of travel.
When I found out that Michael Palin was redoing it 1989 I couldn’t think of a better person to capture Perelman’s sensibilities. Although Palin’s series was more documentary than fictional, it still captured the essence to me of a Perelman story with Palin as the put-upon narrator. It was fucking brilliant.
Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.
What I like about Perelman’s work is what he does with language. In his short stories he is a master of twisting definitions around and using language in an amusing way. There were times when I first started reading him I’d have to grab a dictionary and look up words to fully understand the true humor of whatever it is he was writing about.
There is social commentary in his work and even though it is of a time, (1930's-1960's) I feel it’s timeless. He name drops in the funniest ways and makes up character names that still make me chuckle.
Most of the time Perelman is our narrator and he is always put upon. He always has the clearest notion of what’s going on, even when he doesn’t.
I marvel at his vocabulary and his mastery of the language but more important, he makes me laugh. Even to this day. Whenever I’m having a rough day, I can pull out one of his books from my bookshelf and before I know it I’m lost in his humor.
His stories are an amazing stress reliever.
He’s one of the reasons I work hard on my writing every day. It takes a lot of work to be that good of a writer and be funny.
I’m also a big fan of James Thurber and Robert Benchley when it comes to short humor pieces.
To learn more about Perelman check out this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._J._Perelman
If you have a moment I’d appreciate it if you checked out my books at (www.angryfilmmaker.com/gear) I’m certainly not as funny as Perelman, in fact my style is totally different, but I do my best.
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