It is a strange force that compels a writer to be a humorist. It is a strange force, if you care to go back farther, that compels anyone to be a writer at all, but this is neither the time nor the place to bring up that matter. The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats? In all understatement, the author's lot is a hard one, and yet there are those who deliberately set out to make it harder for themselves. There are those who, in their pride and their innocence, dedicate their careers to writing humorous pieces. Poor dears, the world is stacked against them from the start, for everybody in it has the right to look at their work and say, "I don't think that's funny."

It is not a pleasant thought, though, I am afraid, an unavoidable one, that there cannot be much demand for written humor in this our country today. For the supply is—with one exception—scanty and shopworn. There are quantities of those who, no doubt, if filling out a questionnaire, put, "Occupation, humorist," but their pieces are thin and tidy and timid. They find a little formula and milk it until it moos with pain. They stay with the good old comic symbols so that you won't be upset—the tyrannical offspring, the illiterate business associate, the whooping, devil-may-care old spinster (always reliable), the pitiable inadequacies of a man trying to do a bit of carpentry, the victorious criticisms of the little wife.

Over and over and on and on, they write these pieces, in the rears of magazines, in glossy Sunday supplements of newspapers, over and over and on and on, like a needle stuck in a phonograph record. I could name names, if I could remember them. But that would mean nothing. You have seen those pieces, and they were dead before the sun went down on the day on which they were published.

I had thought, on starting this composition, that I should define what humor means to me. However, every time I tried to, I had to go and lie down with a cold wet cloth on my head. Still, here I go. (For the British I had great reverence, until now, when it is so much about how charming Lady Cicely looked when she fell out of the punt.) Humor to me, Heaven help me, takes in many things. There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it. There must be some lagniappe in the fact that the humorist has read something written before 1918. There must be, in short, S. J. Perelman.

Mr. Perelman stands alone in this day of humorists. Mr. Perelman—there he is. Robert Benchley, who was probably nearest to Perelman, and Ring Lardner, who was nearest to nobody, are gone, and so Mr. Perelman stands by himself. Lonely he may be—but there he is.

And here he is in his own words:

"Button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin and pauper-poor is S. J. Perelman, whose tall, stooping figure is better known to the twilit half-world of five continents than to Publishers' Row. That he possesses the power to become invisible to finance companies; that his laboratory is tooled up to manufacture Frankenstein-type monsters on an incredible scale; and that he owns one of the rare mouths in which butter has never melted are legends treasured by every schoolboy.

"Retired today to peaceful Erwinna, Pennsylvania, Perelman raises turkeys which he occasionally displays on Broadway, stirs little from his alembics and retorts. Those who know hint that the light burning late in his laboratory may result in a breathtaking electric bill. Queried, he shrugs with the fatalism of your true Oriental. 'Mektoub,' he observes curtly. 'It is written.'"

His latest book, The Road to Miltown, or Under the Spreading Atrophy, seems to me by far his best; but that is what everybody says about a Perelman latest book. The only snide thing I can find to say about this one—and I had to strain to dig that up—is that I find the subtitle unnecessary, and in no way up to the title proper. I have been told often, and I know and have known that one should not read through at a sitting a book of short pieces. Well, it turns out that those who told me were fools and so was I, for you can go right through The Road to Miltown. There is in this compilation a variety that knocks you dizzy.

Mr. Perelman has bounded over continents and seas, and come back to put it all before you—not quietly, not sweetly, nothing about the messes of nations, but just right there. Mr. Perelman every time he writes takes a leap that causes you to say, "Now wait a minute," but it is so well worth waiting for. Mr. Perelman, went around the world, of course, but he took the world by the tail and slung it casually over his shoulder.

These pieces in The Road to Miltown have been in The New Yorker and, I think, Holiday, but you never have a feeling of having read any of it before. The remarkable bits called "Cloudland Revisited" are spaced through his book. They are his blood-curdling experiences with old-time movies. For six months after seeing Erich von Stroheim in Foolish Wives, confesses Mr. Perelman, "I exhibited a maddening tendency to click my heels and murmur 'Bitte?' along with a twitch as though a monocle were screwed into my eye. The mannerisms finally abated, but not until the dean of Brown University had taken me aside and confided that if I wanted to transfer to Heidelberg, the faculty would not stand in my way."

There are his days as a young rapier-keen cartoonist for a comic weekly whose editors, he complains, were inexplicably unmoved by such masterpieces from his drawing board as one showing "a distraught gentleman careening into a doctor's office clutching a friend by the wrist and whimpering, 'I've got Bright's disease and he has mine.'"

But Mr. Perelman does not tilt at windmills (Dear, dear—is it National Cliché Week already—so early in the year?); he goes after the big nasty ones, the cruel, the ignorant, the mean. He is not frightened by the rich and the idiotic. As he says, "I don't know anything about medicine, but I know what I like."

Well, I think that Mr. Perelman's book, The Road to Miltown, is fine. That's all I meant to say.

A week or two ago Mr. Perelman had pressed on his humid brow a wreath of laurels for being the best screen writer of the year (for Around the World in 80 Days). I think I may say that Mr. Perelman never wanted to be a great screen writer, never saw screen writing as a goal. Still, if you're going to be a screen writer, it must be a satisfaction to be the best. And that is also true of a humorist writer.