Review of The Last Laugh, by S.J. Perelman. New York Times, July 19, 1981.

S.J. PERELMAN, it turns out, left behind four chapters of an autobiography when he died in 1979. He planned to call it ”The Hindsight Saga,” a perelmaniacal spin off ”The Forsythe Saga.” These bits of memoir, published for the first time in ”The Last Laugh,” are the tailpiece to a collection of 17 of Perelman’s comic sketches for The New Yorker. Even in its fragmentary state, ”The Hindsight Saga” strikes me as the best thing Perelman ever wrote. So much so, in fact, I can’t help but wonder why some editor, somewhere along the way, didn’t take El Sid, as admirers sometimes called Sidney Joseph Perelman, by the back of his custom-collared neck and push his nose and the round-rimmed spectacles on the bridge above and the Cold Stream Guards thatch on the lip below into this sort of material long ago…

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