SOURCE: Review of The Rising Gorge, in The Times Literary Supplement, November 30, 1962, p. 940.

In the following review, the critic observes that Perelman's jokes, while "imaginative and versatile, " on occasion fail, becoming little more than mechanical gags.

Most of the sketches in this book have appeared before, in The New Yorker. Mr. Perelman is an accomplished and famous comedian, who deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with James Thurber. Peter De Vries and other celebrated contributors to that magazine. In common with them he is high-spirited, imaginative and versatile. Puns, parodies, pratfalls are all in his compass. He is excellent on New York—for example, in Greenwich Village,

the Method actors with stormy faces and fat ankles, the models as angular as the Afghans who drew them along, the leather craftsmen nursing dreams of sandals too abstract to contemplate.

He is, like Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West...