SOURCE: "Last of the Classy American Humorists," in The Washington Post Book World, September 6, 1970, p. 9.

In the following review of Baby, It's Cold Inside, Freedman finds Perelman's humor, though funny, largely reminiscent of a bygone era.

With Benchley and Thurber long among the archangels, and Frank Sullivan emerging from his Saratoga fastness only at Yuletide, S. J. Perelman is the last of the really classy American humorists.

Not that there aren't lots of very funny chaps around—Tom Wolfe and Marvin Kitman pop into mind—but the short, personal, intentionally humorous feuilleton as practiced by the masters of the Thirties and Forties seems to have gone the way of the auk and the haircut.

John Crosby has fled to England, Art Buchwald has gone stale lately, and Russell Baker is engulfed in the marmoreal gloom of the Times format, which would make Mark Twain read like Mortician's World...