Wild Pitch

By Stefan Kanfer

THAT OLD GANG O' MINE by S.J. Perelman Morrow; 160 pages; $12.95

He was, in his own words, "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." But when he died in 1979 at the age of 75, S. (for Sidney) J. (for Joseph) Perelman was remembered--at the top and at the bottom--as a mad humorist, one of the great comic artists of his generation. His work had been played onscreen by the Marx brothers and it had won him an Oscar in 1956 for the screenplay of Around the World in 80 Days. His absurdist prose had been collected in 21 hilarious volumes, and it had made him one of the few humorists ever elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Still, as Perelman once pointed out, in the '20s even Dillinger had to start small.

The comic artist began his career decorating pages of Brown University's humor magazine, Brown Jug. In 1925 he moved on to Judge, a brash antecedent of The New Yorker. Most of that magazine's contents deservedly perished; Perelman, almost alone, produced work that virtually demands revival. The proof resides in the pages of That Old Gang o' Mine, gathered by Historian Richard Marschall.

Here is the nascent Perelman, cocky and manic, throwing an assortment of wild pitches. In his strabismic view the pun is mightier than the word: "G'wan y' big Slav, Ural wet!" complains a well-dressed lady to a Soviet gent. "Who was the mug that put to sea with only two fleas?" asks the author. "Remember, I won't take Noah for an answer." These sophomoric japes are accompanied by ham-handed woodcuts and ink drawings done by S.J. Perelman's least favorite artist: S.J. Perelman. But as the '20s draw to a close, Perelman's lines grow more controlled, in every sense. His drawings are no longer spin-offs of Victorian song sheets and samplers. His figures are more cubistic; there is a touch of Picasso and Klee in some of the caricatures.

The essays are still exercises in free association: "About October 15th the moon will be in Virgo, Uranus will be in the ascendant, Sagittarius will be well on the wane from looking thru too many keyholes, and Mrs. Feinberg, in the apartment below, will have finished hammering in nails with her husband's best military hairbrushes. Between then and January 1st ... Mrs. Feinberg will open the winter season by hammering nails in her husband." There are signs of the dictionary-intoxicated writer who would soon influence such disparate humorists as E.B. White and Woody Allen: "A cry of exultation met the gallant deliverers of the fort, for the tedium had almost given out and now there was fresh tedium for all." Or "There was a flash of rebellion in those clear topaz eyes, inherited from centuries of Jewish warrior ancestors who had fallen in the Crusades into easy jobs."

Marschall notes that Perelman's graphics reflect a "growing obsession with the trappings, and traps, of American cul ture. By 1931 he evidently decided that the best way for him to deal with this subject matter was exclusively by the written word." This Perelman did for nearly 50 years, primarily in the pages of The New Yorker. But the great edifice of his satire rests on these early pieces. He was a source and a delight even before he had learned control and timing. As That Old Gang o' Mine demonstrates, he was irreplaceable.

-- By Stefan Kanfer