5 ideas
A cliché is a metaphor whose image nobody sees anymore. Perelman gets his comedy by taking such phrases at face value and following the literal picture to its absurd end, which makes the reader notice how much ordinary prose runs on images no one is looking at.
The comedy comes from describing trivial, seedy or commercial subjects in an ornate, Latinate, erudite vocabulary, sometimes switching to Yiddish or slang in mid-sentence. The mismatch between register and subject exposes the pretensions of both, and it lets the writer mock popular culture while showing he has absorbed it completely.
Perelman reads ads, catalogs and trade-magazine prose as if they were literature describing a real world. He then imagines the characters and situations their promises imply. Pushing an ad's logic into a full scene reveals the anxieties and fantasies the copy is built to exploit.
In "Waiting for Santy," subtitled a Christmas playlet with a bow to Clifford Odets, Santa's workshop becomes a Depression-era sweatshop. The overworked gnomes speak in the agitated proletarian idiom of Odets's labor drama "Waiting for Lefty." Putting the conventions of earnest political theater into a children's fantasy setting shows how a genre's style can be parodied separately from its subject.
In his "Cloudland Revisited" series, Perelman went back as an adult to the popular novels and silent films that had enthralled him as a boy. He recounted their overheated plots and prose in deadpan detail. The pieces record how a sensibility shaped by pulp entertainment turns into critical laughter, while the nostalgia survives the mockery.