The Last Laugh

S. J. Perelman was a prolific humorist and satirist at the New Yorker for almost half a century. His contributions had a surrealistic quality in style and in subject that elicited from Dorothy Parker the judgment that he had "a disciplined eye and a wild mind" and "a magnificent disregard" for his reader. His raillery was aimed at popular fiction, motion pictures, advertising, and similar features of our transient culture. In his preferred form, a short drama, Perelman excelled in the unconventional, the concentrated, the sophisticated in humor.

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