S. J. Perelman

It's the birthday of humorist S(idney) J(oseph) Perelman, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1904). He wrote essays for The New Yorker magazine for years, and he's the author of the collections The Ill-Tempered Clavichord (1952) and Chicken Inspector No. 23 (1966). He 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."
Perelman said of himself, "Button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin and pauper-poor is S.J. Perelman ...that he owns one of the rare mouths in which butter has never melted [is a] legend treasured by every schoolboy."