Happy Birthday, SJP

Friend Lee Tyler sent me this fine appreciation of humorist S.J. Perelman by TIME columnist Richard Corliss. I tried to quibble with it several times--now there's a window into my personality--but really couldn't. I do have a quibble with Perelman himself, however: the style that cracked a million thesauri--the very thing people like Corliss so lionize him for--is a full-body Achilles heel. When it works to convey precise meaning through more general, yet still flavorful imagery and references--"rapier-thin, cucumber-cool"--it works beautifully. But when it's simply dragging a bucket along the murky bottom of SJP's consciousness, referencing old movies he saw as a boy, it's not as much a "style" as a bizarre neurological disorder. It doesn't communicate to anyone but the author, and that's a flaw in any audience-driven art. It's clearly why Perelman hasn't spawned an industry like Thurber has, or blazed a stylistic trail like Benchley has, or remains catnip to a certain type of reader like Parker is, and will ever be. Perelman is to humor what haute couture is to fashion. Beloved by cognoscenti, almost theoretical. But such stuff, writing style or future renown, is fundamentally out of one's control, so perhaps it's fairer--certainly it's accurate--to say that, as someone who helped to shape not one but two great American comics, Groucho Marx and Woody Allen, SJP's place in humor history is secure. People don't read any short literary humor today, not just Perelman; if print was the dominant form, he's still be talked about, like Lord Buckley and Ernie Kovacs and Harvey Kurtzman are still talked about, cult figures who toiled in art forms that still thrive. Like them, SJP represents the outer edge, the farthest one aspect of comedy writing has ever been taken, and there's currency in that--at least within the fraternity of humorists.