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Sto caricando le informazioni... The most of S. J. Perelman (originale 1958; edizione 1958)di S. J. Perelman
Informazioni sull'operaMost of the Most of S. J. Perelman di S. J. Perelman (1958)
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Stephen Leacock having stopped writing humour, Mr. Perelman stepped up to be the most celebrated American Humourist of his day. e was often amusing, and sometimes quite funny. this is the efficient way to absorb what you will of his scope, talents, and ambitions. ( ) S.J. Perelman was an American humorist, best known for his short pieces in The New Yorker and for writing two of the best Marx Brothers films. This collection of New Yorker stories is not necessarily best read in large chunks (it's a massive collection), but rather as one takes appetizers. Perelman may have the best vocabulary of any American writer I've ever read. His turns of phrase are often brilliant and made more so by the astonishing range of words with which he turns those phrases. The pieces are largely divided into two kinds: those in which an event or a news item or such has caught his attention and he spins off a scenario or readers' theatre script satirizing its foibles, and those in which he recounts adventures from his own life. All of these are wonderfully amusing, but the real laughs I found to reside almost always in his tales of his own experiences. Included is a portion of Westward Ha!, a hilarious tellling of his 'round-the-world trip with Broadway caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, and if the entire 600 pages of this book had been devoted to that trip, I would have been delighted. Also of particular interest are a couple of pieces relating to his friendship with Groucho Marx. It's no wonder that Perelman wrote so well for the Marxes, as his somewhat surreal sense of humor is a great match for theirs. Perelman is for comic writing, as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are for hardboiled stories, one of the great purveyors of a kind of language that doesn't exist anymore except in parody or homage, an ironic, witty, and utterly of-its-time style that defies (for me at least) explanation or precise definition, but which is the soul of American letters in the 1920s and '30s.
The huge advantage of American humour, as one sees it in S. J. Perelman, is in the punishment of character and the use of language. Unlike Thurber who has been much admired by us, Perelman is not an understater who suddenly throws out an almost spiritual blossom. He drops ash into the dessert. Perelman either grew up with burlesque or soon got caught up in it. Immediate action is his need... For a long time the English humorists have suffered from having achieved the funny man’s dream; they have either gone straight for the information or have succumbed to the prosaic beauty of their own utterance. They are ‘facetious’ without being Boswell. Mr Perelman is not entirely free of the English vice. I have caught him adding an unnecessary ‘I said with hauteur’ or ‘I said with dignity’. This weakness he may have picked up on his annual visits to those fake cathedral closes of ours in Savile Row. (The metaphor is his.) But he does not wear thin. There are four or five narky things in the present book which are as good as anything in Crazy Like a Fox. Appartiene alle Collane EditorialiElenchi di rilievo
A collection of works by one of America's most popular humorists offers his unique perspective on books, movies, New York socialites, the newspaper business, country life, travel, Hollywood, the publishing industry, and himself. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)818.5209Literature English (North America) Authors, American and American miscellany 20th Century 1900-1945 BiographyClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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