An anguished father, having groomed his son for greatness in the business sector, finds himself ignominiously displaced from his executive position by his offspring, aged all of thirteen.
However, the title here is simply a hook on which to hang a jaded account of a thoroughly rotten father-son relationship. ‘Stringing up Father’ parodies the title of an ancient comic strip, ‘Bringing up Father’. Halfway through, the story morphs into a play about an editorial meeting, chaired by a mythical ‘queen-pin of the pulp oligarchy”. It’s about a tough woman publisher who has a morbid fear of “being yessed to death by sycophantic staffers” and lays traps for them by offering mediocre ideas of her own to see whether they will have the gumption to challenge her. There’s nothing mundane about ‘The Hand That Cradles the Rock’.
He is driven mad by its “macabre shuffle” but eventually goes to bed and sleeps “like a top, with no assistance except three and a half grains of barbital”. ‘Is there an Osteosynchrondroitician in the House?’ announces his morbid fascination with the gently rotating bones of an articulated foot display in a shoestore window. And so am I, honey, if I can lay my hands on a good five-cent psychiatrist.” Right now, it’s over at some expert’s office, about to be analyzed. “I bet I could pass through a room containing an electric comforter in the original gift box and emerge with a third degree burn,” he says, and ends on a not very reassuring note: “Luckily I had the presence of mind to plunge it into a pail of water and yell for help. ‘To Sleep, Perchance to Steam’, tells of his encounter with an electric blanket. The titles of his sketches hint at what the reader is in for. In a pile of the latter I found a fairly well-preserved copy of that classical minstrelsy, ‘Cohen on the Telephone’. Every sort of object imaginable was being offered by street hawkers – basketwork, noodles, poodles, hardware, leeches, breeches, peaches, watermelon seeds, roots, boots, flutes, coats, shorts, stoats, even early vintage phonograph records. “A veritable fusillade of smells, compounded of the pungent odors of deep fat, shark’s fin, sandalwood, and open drains, now bombarded our nostrils and we found ourselves in the thriving hamlet of Chinnwangtao. Here he is in ‘Westward Ha!’, recording his impressions as he wanders through a busy marketplace somewhere in China: One example is worth more than a thousand adjectives. Now that I have re-visited him in old age I can confidently add my signature to the list of names calling for him to be pronounced one of the greatest English language humorists of the twentieth century.
I was an unripe adolescent, ready for my imagination and vocabulary to be stretched by his manic prose. I discovered Perelman through ‘Westward Ha!’, an account of his travels to exotic places with his friend Al Hirschfield, the equally brilliant caricaturist. Woody Allen, who acknowledged his indebtedness to Perelman, came later, as did Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder and the many other talented Jewish actors and writers who made life bearable for me. His writings keyed me in to the joys of satire, incongruity and sheer nonsense. His hundreds of short sketches are packed with crazy associations dressed up in erudite language and peppered with the sorts of yiddishisms which would be familiar to any Jewish child brought up in the secret world of immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. Sidney Joseph Perelman, better known to the world as SJ Perelman, (he didn’t care for his given names)specialized in turning life into a string of gags.
0 kommentar(er)
