What do TS Eliot, the Coen brothers, Dorothy Parker, Mel Brooks, Clive James and Woody Allen have in common? The answer is that they all admired SJ Perelman, the droll New York prose stylist and Oscar-winning screenwriter. There’s a crowded field in the sweepstakes for the best writer you’ve never heard of, but the form book suggests that Perelman would place, at the very least. He wrote for Hollywood and the New Yorker in the middle of the 20th century, when smart, wisecracking American humour was the laughter heard across the globe. He collaborated with the Marx Brothers on Monkey Business and Horse Feathers and received his Academy Award for Around the World in 80 Days. There was an SJP bossing Manhattan when Sex and the City was just a bubble in a cosmopolitan.
Now some of Perelman’s work has been republished. Cloudland Revisited: A Misspent Youth in Books and Film brings together essays in which the mature Perelman returns to the dime store novels and schlocky movies that he enjoyed in his teens. It’s been many years since I first read and loved him: would Cloudland Revisited take me back to cloud nine?
