Magpie vs. Kangaroo
Or, S.J. Perelman’s glittering nonsense
Which animal do you most want your brain to resemble?
The magpie is a worthy answer, a nod to the bird that collects shiny bits of this and that from hither and thither, building a nest out of its treasures. If you absorb all manner of interesting facts, observations, and anecdotes, you stand a good chance of pulling something interesting out of the nest on short notice. That’s the idea behind this newsletter full of shiny bits, and it came from my book Elements of Wit, where it was illustrated thusly by Sarah Lazarovic:
But what if you went with the kangaroo?
S.J. Perelman (1904-1979) was accurately described as having the mind of this marsupial, and impressive as it is to behold, it’s not something to aspire to. In his 1973 on-the-snout essay “The Kangaroo Mind of S.J. Perelman,” Louis Hasley makes the case that, while Perelman is one of the all-time great American humorists, he’s also basically unreadable. You know those humour pieces that start with an innocuous line from a news item and then riff on it via a thousand-word playlet? Perelman invented them. His was the voice that populated The New Yorker with shouts and murmurs, wrote movies with the Marx brothers, and inspired a generation of comedians.
So how do you manage to be great but not good? Perelman did it with sentences that glittered like radiant-cut diamonds and essays that read like a barefoot walk across a field of such diamonds. He’s in love with language but often indifferent to the reader. In Perelman’s writing, Halsey observes, “metaphor crops up like marijuana growing wild in Mexico.” He’ll start a piece with a line like:
The other day I surfaced in a pool of glorious golden sunshine laced with cracker crumbs to discover that spring had returned to Washington Square.
Then he’ll hop around a bit until he lands on a sentence like:
When, therefore, I inadvertently stubbed a tooth on a submerged cherry in an old-fashioned last week and my toupee ricocheted off the ceiling, I felt both dismayed and betrayed.
He did this over and over again in pieces with titles like Our Unbalanced Aquariums, Boy Meets Girl Meets Foot, Methinks He Doth Protein Too Much, Hell in the Gabardines, and The Saucier’s Apprentice. There’s something going on in there, right? Or as one of his characters pronounced elsewhere:
“Hot puppies,” I burst out excitedly. “This isn’t prose — it’s frozen music! The gink who wrote this is the bee’s knees!”
But a bowlful of frozen music does not make a meal. Perelman cited James Joyce as an inspiration, and there’s some Finnegans wakefulness about his writing. Lots of spectacular things are happening at once, and the effect is overwhelming. Or as Perelman described a popular gossip columnist of his day:
Once your system adjusts to her syntax, and the initial impulse to scream or scale a tree wears off, it has a wonderful emollient effect, somewhat like sliding into a tub of lukewarm oatmeal.
So how does a magpie square off against a kangaroo? My advice after a few hours with Most of the Most of S.J. Perelman: Do a flyby, look for the shiny stuff, and don’t follow the hops too closely.
Quick quips; lightning
“No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.”
— Montaigne
“If your parents didn’t have any children, there’s a good chance that you won’t have any.”
— Clarence Day
“One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.”
— William Hazlitt
A Quizzical For Lebowitz
Living legends are the worst. Instead of toiling in obscurity like the rest of us, they loll about on their laurels. And rather than collect bouquets at the base of their statues like mythical beings, they continue to breathe unfair shares of our air.
Like Fran Lebowitz. The famous non-writer and bona fide Great Wit was the subject of Public Speaking, a 2010 documentary by (oh no) fellow Living L. Martin Scorsese. Everyone doffed their caps to those two back then. But then they went and did a sequel, in six parts, on Netflix, and in the middle of a pandemic.
And so the knives came out. In the Times, Ginia Bellafante sharpened her dagger but only opted to give Fran a scratch. In the newsletter Dirt, Daisy Alioto sank the blade right in, calling her “the worst type of guy: the big guy that insists he’s a little one.”
Every Great Wit has to get there eventually. They say iconic things more than they say original things, and so you get to the Kids in the Hall sketch in which Buddy Cole is stuck on a desert island with Oscar Wilde, who runs out of material in under five minutes.
The Fran 2021 version of that is Bowen Yang’s impersonation on last week’s Saturday Night Live. Herewith, an assortment of her originals and his parodies. Which is which? And does it matter?
1. I’ve been so bored at home I was about to get married to my cufflinks.
2. I was supposed to be writing a novel six years ago, but I took ten years off to sulk.
3. The only outdoor gathering I go to is the taxi line at JFK. You know why? They let you smoke.
4. I myself find many — even most — things objectionable. Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home.
5. I’ve done so many interviews in front of audiences, I have squatter’s rights at the 92nd Street Y.
6. Twenty-four-hour room service generally refers to the length of time that it takes for the club sandwich to arrive.
7. Be something useful. Be a piece of melon wrapped in prosciutto.
8. A salad is not a meal. It is a style.
9. Kids are so short nowadays. You know why? You can’t smoke in bars anymore.
10. Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky. One can only assume that this has something to do with not smoking enough.
Lebowitz is even, Yang is odd, and the living legend is perhaps just far enough from self-parody to keep them both in wrapped prosciutto.
Thank you for sliding into the warm tub of GWQ No. 84. Pretend diamonds are kangaroo’s best friend. Pretend Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting is a book. I’ve been keeping that Isaac Asimov pun amid the cracker crumbs in my nest for years. Magpies, peck the♥️ below.