SOURCE: "Marxist," in The New Statesman, Vol. 91, No. 2351, April 9, 1976, p. 476.

In the following review of Vinegar Puss, Theroux calls Perelman "a shaping force of comedy " and offers the book high praise.

It is amazing, not to say criminal, that these greedy islands, the gula archipelago so to speak, feast so mightily on old Marx Brothers films without even a nod to the chef. A little research on my part has revealed that none of S. J. Perelman's 18 previous books is in print in Britain, though there is a rumour that Crazy Like a Fox is circulating here in an American paperback. So much for his 50 years of conscientiously manufacturing laughing gas, and in this sense he bears some resemblance to his opposite number in Britain, 'Beachcomber'—indeed, everything that Richard Ingrams wrote in the preface to his superb collection The Best of Beachcomber applies to Perelman in America...