S. J. Perelman is one of those humorists—he prefers to think of himself as a writer of "the sportive essay"—who hits the reader on the after-beat. He catches up to you going away from the joke, innocently unsuspecting, with the cream pie of the jest already smeared across your face. He puts you into stitches by a kind of kint one, Perel two technique….

The long fuse Perelman strings to his jokes is quintessentially verbal. He uses syntax the way a silent comedian uses the double take. (A typical delayed-action sentence: "He departed ere we could grapple for the check.")

The Perelman style—its eminent reasonableness, its barely-mock dignity, its subtly staged collisions between gentility and slang—allows him to keep cover until the last possible moment. Round and round those half-crouching sentences spiral until the reader feels like a besieged straight man in a Marx...