There are at least two distinct types of laughter that the writing of S. J. Perelman produces in the reader, the Honk and the Yurble. Of these, the Honk is the more frequent. It might be the effect of a line of dialogue ("He opened a vein in his bath." "I never knew baths had veins.") or one of his intricately bizarre openings ("Every so often, when business slackens up in the bowling alley and the other pin boys are hunched over their game of bezique, I like to exchange my sweatshirt for a crisp white surgical tunic, polish up my optical mirror, and examine the corset advertisements in The New York Herald Tribune. . . .") or one of his all-purpose endings ("We bashed in his conk and left him to the vultures."). The Yurble is caused by Perelman's linguistic cobbling, as for example when "a panoply of porn" becomes "a pornoply" or he asserts "I hold no buff for the briefalo" or he gathers a cast that includes Gonifson, Hornbostel and Groin, and the atmosphere begins to resemble that of Nighttown with Leopold Bloom cruising through its surreal precincts.

In a sense, the humorist is like the man who hijacks a jumbo jet and its 300 passengers by threatening the pilot with a 10-cent water pistol. The arsenal is simple—technique matters, manner is everything, and fury helps. Mr. Perelman is good on the grotesque, because he is great at his tetchiest and best when he is angry. A movie such as I Loved You Wednesday or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a magazine like House and Garden, the book Oh, Doctor! My Feet! by Dr. Dudley J. Morton, or practically any inedible sandwich is enough to set him off. But he is never more furiously comic as when dealing with a specific geographical location, whether it is a house in eastern Pennsylvania (about which he wrote an entire book, Acres and Pains) or a back street in Kowloon.

We are still waiting for his autobiography, The Hindsight Saga, although many of the facts are known. Having made a substantial reputation in the 30's taking apart monthlies like The Jitterbug and The Cleaning and Dyeing World, Mr. Perelman set sail in the 40's, and I can think of nowhere (McMurdo Sound might be an exception) he has not traveled. The Island of Lamu, the remote city of Pagan, the bars on Suriwongse Road, the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia—all have been visited and satirized by this tireless jokester whose 20 books have over the years not shown the slightest diminution in inventiveness. His new book is all travel, beginning 33,000 feet over Cape Ann, heading east, and after sojourns in Scotland, Turkey, Iran, Israel, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, winding up in Hollywood. One can only conclude, after such an ambitious itinerary, that Mr. Perelman swallowed enough Kaopectate to turn him into a vase, but in the event his "peregrination of the planet" (as he neatly puts it) seems to have resulted in his becoming a vessel of wrath, though not the less readable for all that.

"From bar mitzvah on," Mr. Perelman writes at the start of Eastward Ha!, "I had longed to qualify as a Jewish Robert Louis Stevenson." It is one of Mr. Perelman's more modest claims, but after reading "Unshorn Locks and Bogus Bagels," an account of his stay in Israel, one tends to think that he is in grave danger of being read out of the tribe for his having brought such ill tidings to Zion. "What magic, what ingenuity and manpower it had taken to recreate Grossinger's, the Miami Fountainebleau and the Concord Hotel on a barren strand in the Near East!" In Tel Aviv he came across a brand of perfume called Chutzpah. He describes this as a breakthrough even Dr. Chaim Weizmann ("himself a chemist") would have applauded: "Not a soul in history, from Helen of Troy to Helena Rubinstein, had ever thought of pure, unadulterated gall as a cosmetic." He notes in passing that the best hotel in Jerusalem—if not in the whole country—is run "by a family of Baptists." But Perelman is nothing if not fair-minded, and I cannot think of anyone better equipped to describe the troglodyte face of Yassir Arafat—indeed, I believe he has already done so, with devastating results.

Typically, because he hated the place so thoroughly, the Israel piece is one of his funniest. Discomfort, pomposity, bad service, importuning natives, hideous weather—anything vile makes Mr. Perelman's prose sing with mockery. Years ago, miffed in this present book's companion volume, Westward Ha! he was forced to leave "enough baksheesh in Santa Sophia to gild the transept"; and who but Perelman would have titled a comedy The Rising Gorge? In his disgust resides his eloquence. His experience of the Soviet Union in "The Millennium, and What They Can Do With It" is pure acid. Nothing went right, yet the result is not a tantrum but a glorious backhander in which everything he saw from Moscow to Yalta is dismissed. "Yalta contains sanitariums that ignite more hypochondria in the onlooker than the Magic Mountain . . . that Chekhov managed to glean any literary nuggets from Yalta is merely added proof of his stature." In Iran, which is (in spite of the protestations of the diabolical regime's former apologist, Mrs. Javits) one of the earth's nightmares of unspeakable modernity and uncompromising barbarism, Mr. Perelman lets fly, but always with grace: "the demented thoroughfares" in Teheran are terrifying, "as a result, there are only two kinds of pedestrians . . . the quick and the dead."

It is only when Mr. Perelman is describing a dear friend or a well-loved place that his voice drops and one hears his so-rarely-used tone of gratitude or good will. In Penang, the colonial buildings and warehouses and dockside life "typified for me the magic of Kipling's Far East." It sounds like sarcasm; one waits for his swift deflation, but none comes—it is, almost incredibly, nostalgia. This is unexpected, but perhaps not all that odd, for like the references to Daddy Browning and Peaches, Joshua Slocuni, Tazio Nuvolari, the Three Stooges, the reminiscences of Rhode Island and Hollywood, the exact price of brooms in Tzmir and words like "mazuma," "chicken-flicker" and "simoleon," there is room in Perelman's prose style for nearly everything. It is not so strange that in her introduction to a Perelman collection some years ago, Parker was at a loss for words. Perelman is incomparable.