Perelman dropped out of Brown and moved to
Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York City. In these numerous brief sketches he pioneered a new and unique style, using parody to "wring every drop of false feeling or slovenly thinking." They were infused with a sense of ridicule, irony, and wryness and frequently used his own misadventures as their theme. Perelman chose to describe these pieces as
feuilletons — a French literary term meaning "literary or scientific articles; serial stories" (literally "little leaves") — and he defined himself as a
feuilletoniste. Perelman's only attempt at a conventional novel (
Parlor, Bedlam and Bath, written in collaboration with
Quentin Reynolds) was unsuccessful, and throughout his life he was resentful that authors who wrote in the full-length form of novels received more literary respect (and financial success) than short-form authors like himself even as he openly admired British humorist
P.G. Wodehouse. While many believe ''Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge'' to be a novel, it is actually his first collection of humorous pieces, many written while he was a student at Brown. It is largely considered
juvenilia , and its pieces were never included in future Perelman collections. The tone of Perelman's
feuilletons was very different from those sketches of the inept "little man" struggling to cope with life that
James Thurber and other
New Yorker writers of the era frequently produced. Yet his references to himself were typically wittily self-deprecatory—as for example, "before they made S.J. Perelman, they broke the mold." Sometimes he gleaned an apparently off-hand phrase from a newspaper article or magazine advertisement and would then write a brief, satiric play or sketch inspired by that phrase. A typical example is his 1950s work "No Starch in the Dhoti, ''S'il Vous Plait
." Beginning with an off-hand phrase in a New York Times Magazine'' article ("...the late Pandit
Motilal Nehru—who sent his laundry to Paris—the young Jawaharlal's British nurse etc. etc. ...), Perelman composed a series of imaginary letters that might have been exchanged in 1903 between an angry Pandit Nehru in India and a sly Parisian laundryman about the condition of his laundered underwear. In other sketches, Perelman satirized popular magazines or story genres of his day. In "Somewhere a Roscoe," he pokes fun at the "purple prose" writing style of 1930s pulp magazines such as
Spicy Detective. In "Swing Out, Sweet Chariot," he examines the silliness of the "jive language" found in
The Jitterbug, a teen magazine with stories inspired by the 1930s Swing dance craze. Perelman voraciously read magazines to find new material for his sketches. (He often referred to the magazines as "Sauce for the gander.") Perelman also occasionally used a form of word play that was, apparently, unique to him. He would take a common word or phrase and change its meaning completely within the context of what he was writing, generally in the direction of the ridiculous. In
Westward Ha!, for instance, he writes: "The homeward-bound Americans were as merry as grigs (the Southern Railway had considerately furnished a box of grigs for purposes of comparison)". Another classic Perelman pun is "I've got
Bright's Disease and he's got mine". He also wrote a notable series of sketches called
Cloudland Revisited in which he gives acid (and disillusioned) descriptions of recent viewings of movies (and recent re-readings of novels) that had enthralled him as a youth in Providence, Rhode Island, later as a student at Brown University, and then while a struggling comic artist in Greenwich Village. A number of his works were set in Hollywood and in various places around the world. He stated that as a young man he was heavily influenced by
James Joyce and
Flann O'Brien, particularly his
wordplay, obscure words and references, metaphors,
irony,
parody, paradox, symbols,
free associations,
clang associations,
non-sequiturs, and sense of the ridiculous. All these elements infused Perelman's writings but his style was precise, clear, and the very opposite of Joycean
stream of consciousness. Perelman dryly admitted to having been such a
Ring Lardner thief that he should have been arrested.
Woody Allen has in turn admitted to being influenced by Perelman and recently has written tributes in very much the same style. The two once happened to have dinner at the same restaurant, and when the elder humorist sent his compliments, the younger comedian mistook it for a joke. Authors that admired Perelman's ingenious style included
T.S. Eliot and
W. Somerset Maugham.
Frank Muir, a British expert on comic writing, lauded Perelman as the best American comic author of all time in his
Oxford Book of Humorous Prose. Humorist
Garrison Keillor has declared his admiration for Perelman's writing. Keillor's "Jack Schmidt, Arts Administrator" is a parody of Perelman's classic "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer", itself a parody of the
Raymond Chandler school of tough, amorous 'private-eye'
crime fiction. Irish comedian and actor
Dylan Moran listed Perelman as a major influence in his December 13, 2012 interview on the
WTF with Marc Maron podcast (episode 343). He died in 1979. ==Broadway and film==