S J Perleman

It's the birthday of humorist S(idney) J(oseph) Perelman, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1904). He started working as a cartoonist when he was in college, but he eventually switched to writing humorous essays for various magazines, including The New Yorker. His friend Groucho Marx persuaded him to come to Hollywood to write screenplays. He worked on Marx Brothers movies such as Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932), but Perelman hated Hollywood. He called it, "a dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth, the ethical sense of a pack of jackals, and a taste so degraded that it befouled everything it touched." And he said, "[Working there] was no worse than playing the piano in a whorehouse."
He eventually went back to writing essays for The New Yorker and published many collections, including The Ill-Tempered Clavichord (1952) and Chicken Inspector No. 23 (1966). Much of his work is collected in Most of the Most of S.J. Perelman (2000).
Perelman was famous for his bizarre, absurdist humor. One of his essays begins, "I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."