S.J. Perelman

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It’s the birthday of a man who loved words and who said he had a “lifetime devotion to puns,” humorist S.J. Perelman (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1904), whom The New York Times Magazine once called “the funniest man alive.”

He wrote sentences like, “[The waiters’] eyes sparkled and their pencils flew as she proceeded to eviscerate my wallet — pâté, Whitstable oysters, a sole, and a favorite salad of the Nizam of Hyderabad made of shredded five-pound notes.”

For decades, Perelman wrote for The New Yorker magazine, mostly short humorous sketches, which he described as “feuilletons.” It’s a French word that means “leaves of a book.” Perelman said that he was preoccupied “with clichés, baroque language, and the elegant variation.”