Some people "have" S. J. Perelman in the way that others "have" French, Urdu or Chinook, and the test of their competence is how many and memorable are the chapter titles they can quote. For the list of contents in a book by Mr. Perelman is more precious than the actual texts of most other funny writers. Chicken Inspector No. 23, his first collection in five lean years, contains at least one title to be thankful for: "Nobody Knows the Rubble I've Seen/Nobody Knows but Croesus," and the essay that follows—about househunting in Hollywood—is just as good.

Most of the thirty-three pieces in this book are as furiously and fluently disenchanted as ever. There are one or two displays of the rural incompetence celebrated long ago in Acres and Pains, characteristic attempts to look at the world from a chicken's and even a mackintosh's point of view, an aggressive Balkan travelogue which turns genuinely grumpy. But the best of S. J. Perelman, as usual, comes when a mind quick to take fright is flushed from its rational coverts by sinister little items clipped from newspapers and magazines.

The media that Mr. Perelman has always relied on to feed his fears are not so much mass as crass, and in Chicken Inspector No. 23 he pays more attention than usual to England, and London in particular. But London, like the rest of his world, only reaches him through the filter of his amazingly wide acquaintance with the pulp-myths of the 1920s and 1930s; it runs, roughly, from Curzon Street in the west, in and out of some expensive and pernickety shops, to the Ivy restaurant. Quite rightly, Mr. Perelman has refused to clear his mind of its fertile stock of outdated ideals and stereotypes, and many of the references he uses for comic comparison between what the world might be and what it is are to actors, entertainers and others whose names signal rather weakly to postwar generations.

But this will never stop him from swooping down on sordid realities that do not die with the generations that embody them. In all around, including himself, he sees decay and venality, and the impossible nubility and borrowed verbiage of Hollywood bears a wholly derisory relation to the goings-on of a grubby world. This tension between a cultural rhetoric and biological greed is given its definitive formula by one of Mr. Perelman's Italian entrepreneurs, who says to his partner: "Never mind the rodomontade, just keep your paws out of the cash-drawer."