Most of the sketches in [The Rising Gorge] have appeared before, in The New Yorker…. [Mr. Perelman] deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with James Thurber, Peter De Vries and other celebrated contributors to that magazine. In common with them he is high-spirited, imaginative and versatile. Puns, parodies, pratfalls are all in his compass…. He is, like Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West, a connoisseur of the bizarre and the corrupt, the Hollywood-Broadway-Miami axis, places that have an atmosphere of "immense, weedy lethargy, reminiscent of a bankrupt miniature golf course".

But something often goes wrong with his humour….

His opening paragraphs are usually brilliant bits of pastiche. But then he loses direction. He tries too hard for a laugh: witness the frenetic titles he favours, which tend to be as brassy as the things he is supposed to be mocking…. Perhaps Mr. Perelman is a comedian rather...