[Only] now, reading The Last Laugh, which appears a year and a half after Perelman's death, have I considered the real, concealed value of his work. Parents could do far worse than to leave The Most of S. J. Perelman lying around the house, because its author demonstrates that it is possible to be funny and write well at the same time, a lesson that is not to be taken lightly in an age when so much humor—whether in print, the movies, or on television—has segregated itself from the literary by its predictability and its graceless pandering to the easy guffaw…. Perelman's sentences, however ornamented or clogged with relative clauses, are as well tailored as were his Savile Row tweeds. His vocabulary is so large as to be fetishistic; it combines the arcane and idiomatic without the sesquipedalian. Even in his lesser pieces, which resemble private...