SOURCE: "From Park Avenue to Opium Den," in The New York Times Book Review, August 25, 1946, pp. 4, 25.

In the following review, Maloney studies Perelman's Keep It Crisp, calling the book "superb."

It is the traditional fate of great humorists to be admired and praised by vast hosts of people who misunderstand them. The classic example, of course, is Dean Swift, who hardly intended Gulliver's Travels to be a children's book. Mark Twain, a fairly embittered man in reality, is fondly remembered by his readers (even the readers of Huckleberry Finn) as a kind of forerunner of Bob Hope. And of course everybody remembers Ring Lardner, who wrote those baseball stories.

By good luck or good management S. J. Perelman has escaped this slack-jawed mass adoration. People who understand him like him, and people who can't understand him don't like him. His writing is hundred-proof humor, with none of the...