[In the following review, Sherman discusses the subject matter of The Dream Department, and describes the volume as "lunatic and delightful."]

S. J. Perelman is no Peter Bell. A primrose by a river's brim would never be just a yellow primrose to him. It would always be something more. Likely enough in no time at all it would become a gigantic yellow sunflower, malevolently gnashing its teeth at him, and you too. Anyway Mr. Perelman is not a nature lover—nature faker would be more like it. His particular brand of jittery and joyful madness seems to be the slap-happy result of overexposure to books, magazines and advertisements. Give him a grubby little item in an obscure magazine, or a shiny big ad in one of the slicks, and his lunatic and ludicrous imagination grabs it, plays with it, worries it, until it has developed into a thing of monstrous hilarity.

It seems that he cannot look at a printed or color-engraved page without being haunted by the grotesque and fantastic possibilities that lie behind it, seen through the Perelman distortion lens. He can write in crazily humorous fashion along other lines (see ) but in The Dream Department most of the skits in the collection are hung on the peg of some printed peculiarity. Old magazines in dentists' offices, wrappers on glue or cement tubes, trade and hobby publications, obscure and highly specialized magazines, are fertile fields for Mr. Perelman's roving eye. Yet even the highest class magazines and the most respected family newspapers upon occasion furnish the spark that sends his dizzy imagination off into irreverent and irresistibly funny divagations.

For good measure he is not above inventing a learned quarterly review, just for the fun of it. In "Swing Out, Sweet Chariot," he cites the autumn issue of Spindrift in which he avers he was reading an exciting serial called "Mysticism in the Rationalist Cosmogony, or John Dewey Rides Again." With a thin air of veracity he maintains that his newsdealer was unable to supply him with the next number containing the doings of the Morningside Kid, so he had to be contented with a copy of "The Jitterbug," which set him off on a sizzling critique and interpretation of the favored fiction of young rug-cutters. The line between fact and fancy for Mr. Perelman is very hazy, practically non-existent.

While he was waiting on the corner of Hollywood and Vine Street, a billboard advertising Hostess Cup Cakes—"Oh, Boy! Do I love that secret chocolate blend!"—sent him off into a dream of a five-page playlet, a success and mystery drama called "Button, Button, Who's Got the Blend?" A couple of small items in The New York Times mentioning the use of movies for advertising fashions evoked a "blueprint for a new dramaturgy," a short scenario combining romance and merchandising. The bride asks her mother coyly, "How do you like my wedding tailleur, Mother?" and Mrs. Mifflin replies, "It's a heller. Airman's, of course?"

The range of subject-matter is wide, from goldfish to snakes, from hard liquor to petrified men, from foundation garments to Christmas decorations. And practically all of the sketches are fantastically funny. Even the titles are temptingly funny. For instance, "P-s-s-t, Partner, Your Peristalsis Is Showing," or "A Pox on You, Mine Goodly Host." Most of the collection have appeared in recent years in The New Yorker and The Funny Bone. None of them ought to be missed by any Perelman fan.

S. J. Perelman can be carping, coy, niggling, extravagant or downright tough. In any mood his stuff is lunatic and delightful.