Books: Idiom Savant

VINEGAR PUSS

by S.J. PERELMAN

224 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

Humorist S. (for Sidney) J. (for Joseph) Perelman is in immediate danger of becoming solemnized, a process that begins as a stiffening in the joints where criticism is written, and is likely to end with an untenured English instructor laboring on "Laundry and Dry Cleaning as Objective Correlatives in the Humor of S.J. Perelman." The humorist himself quite possibly anticipated this situation 25 years ago when he titled one of his essays Don't Bring Me Oscars (When It's Shoesies That I Need).

Lately Perelman has been fighting back in other ways. Four years...

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