S. J. Perelman’s incomparable gift for wordplay, witticism, spoofery, and sheer nonsense never shone brighter than in this classic collection, now restored to print in a deluxe paperback edition. Here are such beloved gems as “Waiting for Santy: A Christmas Playlet,” a rollicking parody of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, about seven proletariat gnomes toiling away in Santa’s North Pole sweatshop; the Joycean virtuoso performance “Scenario,” a spoof of a Hollywood pitch meeting that takes the form of a mishmash of movie clichés, showbiz argot, and popular slang; and “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer,” Perelman’s homage to the hardboiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler: “‘Hi,’ the blonde said lazily. ‘You Mike Noonan?’ I made a noise that could have been ‘Yes,’ and waited. She yawned. I thought things over, decided to play it safe. I yawned.”

In a playful, loving new introduction, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Joshua Cohen—himself an artful wordsmith and punster—sets up Perelman’s sui generis comic pieces for a new generation of readers certain to fall in love with a writer whose special gift, as The New York Times once described it, is the ability “to transform the common cliche or figure of speech into an exploding cigar.”

Sidney Joseph Perelman (1904–1979) was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, in which he first published many of his humorous essays and sketches. He also wrote film scripts for the Marx Brothers and shared an Oscar in 1956 with James Poe and James Farrow for the screenplay of Around the World in Eighty Days.

Joshua Cohen is the author of The Netanyahus, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and several other works, including the novels Witz, Book of Numbers, and Moving Kings, and the essay collection ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction.