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Sidney Joseph Perelman (February 1, 1904 – October 17, 1979), known as S. J. Perelman, was an American humorist, author, and screenwriter. He is best known for his humorous short pieces written over many years for ''The New Yorker''. He also wrote for several other magazines, including ''Judge'', as well as books, scripts, and screenplays. Perelman received an Academy Award for screenwriting in 1956. ==Life and career== Perelman's work is difficult to characterize. He wrote many brief, humorous descriptions of his travels for various magazines, and of his travails on his Pennsylvania farm, all of which were collected into books. (A few were illustrated by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who accompanied Perelman on the round-the-world trip recounted in ''Westward Ha!'') Perelman is highly regarded for his humorous short stories that he published in magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, most often in ''The New Yorker''. For these, he is considered the first surrealist humor writer of the United States.〔Donald Barthelme (1982) interview in ''Partisan Review'', (Volume 49 ), p.185 quotation: 〕 In these numerous brief sketches he pioneered a new style that was unique to him, using parody to "wring every drop of false feeling or slovenly thinking."〔Wilfrid Sheed (1970) (''The flinty eye behind the humor'' ) in ''Life (magazine)'', Sep 18, 1970, 〕 They were infused with a sense of ridicule, irony, and wryness and frequently used his own misadventures as their theme. Perelman chose to describe these pieces as ''feuilletons'' — a French literary term meaning "literary or scientific articles; serial stories" (literally "little leaves") — and he defined himself as a ''feuilletoniste''. Perelman's only attempt at a conventional novel (''Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge'') was unsuccessful, and throughout his life he was resentful that authors who wrote in the full-length form of novels received more literary respect (and financial success) than short-form authors like himself even as he openly admired British humorist, P.G. Wodehouse. While many believe ''Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge'' to be a novel, it is actually his first collection of humorous pieces, many written while he was still a student at Brown. It is largely considered juvenilia and its pieces were never included in future Perelman collections. The tone of Perelman's ''feuilletons'', however, was very different from those sketches of the inept "little man" struggling to cope with life that James Thurber and other ''New Yorker'' writers of the era frequently produced. Yet his references to himself were typically wittily self-deprecatory—as for example, "before they made S. J. Perelman, they broke the mold." Although frequently fictional, very few of Perelman's sketches were precisely short stories. Sometimes he would glean an apparently off-hand phrase from a newspaper article or magazine advertisement and then write a brief, satiric play or sketch inspired by that phrase. A typical example is his 1950s work, "No Starch in the Dhoti, ''S'il Vous Plait''." Beginning with an off-hand phrase in a ''New York Times Magazine'' article ("...the late Pandit Motilal Nehru—who sent his laundry to Paris—the young Jawaharlal's British nurse etc. etc. ...), Perelman composed a series of imaginary letters that might have been exchanged in 1903 between an angry Pandit Nehru in India and a sly Parisian laundryman about the condition of his laundered underwear. In other sketches, Perelman would satirize popular magazines or story genres of his day. In "Somewhere A Roscoe," he pokes fun at the "purple prose" writing style of 1930s pulp magazines such as ''Spicy Detective''. In "Swing Out, Sweet Chariot," he examines the silliness of the "jive language" found in ''The Jitterbug'', a teen magazine with stories inspired by the 1930s Swing dance craze. Perelman voraciously read magazines to find new material for his sketches. (He often referred to the magazines as "Sauce for the gander.") Perelman also occasionally used a form of word play that was, apparently, unique to him. He would take a common word or phrase and change its meaning completely within the context of what he was writing, generally in the direction of the ridiculous. In ''Westward Ha!'', for instance, he writes: "The homeward-bound Americans were as merry as grigs (the Southern Railway had considerately furnished a box of grigs for purposes of comparison) ... ". Another classic Perelman pun is "I've got Bright's Disease and he's got mine".〔''S._J. Perelman talks to Tony Bilbow'' (The Listener, Volume 83 ) p.279〕 He also wrote a notable series of sketches called ''Cloudland Revisited'' in which he gives acid (and disillusioned) descriptions of recent viewings of movies (and recent re-readings of novels) which had enthralled him as a youth in Providence, Rhode Island, later as a student at Brown University, and then while a struggling comic artist in Greenwich Village. A number of his works were set in Hollywood and in various places around the world. He stated that as a young man he was heavily influenced by James Joyce and Flann O'Brien, particularly his wordplay, obscure words and references, metaphors, irony, parody, paradox, symbols, free associations, clang associations, non-sequiturs, and sense of the ridiculous. All these elements infused Perelman's own writings but his own style was precise, clear, and the very opposite of Joycean stream of consciousness. Perelman drily admitted to having been such a Ring Lardner thief that he should have been arrested. Woody Allen has in turn admitted to being influenced by Perelman and recently has written what can only be called tributes, in very much the same style. The two once happened to have dinner at the same restaurant, and when the elder humorist sent his compliments, the younger comedian mistook it for a joke. Authors that admired Perelman's ingenious style included T. S. Eliot and W. Somerset Maugham. A British expert on comic writing, Frank Muir, lauded Perelman as the best American comic author of all time in his ''Oxford Book of Humorous Prose''. Humorist Garrison Keillor has declared his admiration for Perelman's writing.〔Garrison Keillor. ''Happy to be Here''. Faber, 1983. ISBN 0-571-14696-1〕 Keillor's 'Jack Schmidt, Arts Administrator' is a parody of Perelman's classic 'Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer',〔S. J. Perelman, Fiction, “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer,” The New Yorker, December 16, 1944, p. 2. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1944/12/16/1944_12_16_021_TNY_CARDS_000197922#ixzz0eXA9Wj50〕 itself a parody of the Raymond Chandler school of tough, amorous 'private-eye' crime fiction. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「S. J. Perelman」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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