SOURCE: "Farewell, Vinegar Puss," in National Review, Vol. XXXIII, No. 23, November 27, 1981, p. 1427.

In the following review of The Last Laugh, Teachout finds Perelman's collection lacking the energy and balance of some of his earlier works.

S. J. Perelman's new, posthumous collection—titled, with a pleasantly black flourish, The Last Laugh—is chiefly made up of pieces Perelman wrote for The New Yorker during the last five years of his life, padded out with four "fragments" from an unfinished autobiography that was to have been called The Hindsight Saga. These chapters (which deal with the Marx Brothers, Nathanael West, Dorothy Parker, and the writing of three screenplays) are brief, comparatively slight reminiscences which sound like typical Perelman essays written with a firmer-than-usual grasp on reality; they suggest that a completed Perelman memoir, whatever its other virtues, would probably have supplied little insight into its author's private life and concerns...