(A few were illustrated by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who accompanied Perelman on the round-the-world trip recounted in Westward Ha!.)

[4] In these numerous brief sketches he pioneered a new and unique style, using parody to "wring every drop of false feeling or slovenly thinking.

The tone of Perelman's feuilletons was very different from those sketches of the inept "little man" struggling to cope with life that James Thurber and other New Yorker writers of the era frequently produced.

Beginning with an off-hand phrase in a New York Times Magazine article ("...the late Pandit Motilal Nehru—who sent his laundry to Paris—the young Jawaharlal's British nurse etc.

...), Perelman composed a series of imaginary letters that might have been exchanged in 1903 between an angry Pandit Nehru in India and a sly Parisian laundryman about the condition of his laundered underwear.

[8] He also wrote a notable series of sketches called Cloudland Revisited in which he gives acid (and disillusioned) descriptions of recent viewings of movies (and recent re-readings of novels) that had enthralled him as a youth in Providence, Rhode Island, later as a student at Brown University, and then while a struggling comic artist in Greenwich Village.

All these elements infused Perelman's writings but his style was precise, clear, and the very opposite of Joycean stream of consciousness.

Irish comedian and actor Dylan Moran listed Perelman as a major influence in his December 13, 2012 interview on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast (episode 343).

In cinema, Perelman is noted for co-writing scripts for the Marx Brothers films Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932), and for the Academy Award-winning screenplay Around the World in 80 Days (1956).

[11] The two worked as writing collaborators on the 1935 play All Good Americans, produced on Broadway, and both were signed by Irving Thalberg as contract screenwriters for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the same year.

His son Adam (born in 1936) committed several robberies in the mid-1950s, was accused of attempted rape, and ended up in a reformatory for wayward boys.

[1][12] The two things that brought Perelman happiness were his MG automobile and a mynah bird, both of which he pampered like babies.

"[13] Perelman had a problematic relationship with Groucho Marx, who once said of the writer, "I hated the son of a bitch, and he had a head as big as my desk.

"[14] In the later years of Perelman's career, he bristled at being identified as a writer of Marx Brothers comedy, insisting that his publishers omit any mention of it in publicity material.

[15] Perelman picked up plenty of pungent expressions from Yiddish and liberally sprinkled his prose with these phrases, thus paving the way for the likes of Philip Roth.

It was his special pleasure in the '30s and '40s to take some inoffensive professional manual by the scruff and wring from it every drop of false feeling or slovenly thinking.