The Funny Man
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Write Act Rep/Brickhouse Theatre
Through July 17
Playwright Will Manus’s one-man homage to humorist and screenwriter S.J. Perelman (Sam Aaron) is a bit of throwback, and that’s a compliment. In a world as lunatic and partisan as ours, when the divide between evidence and superstition has melted across huge swaths of the country (strategically and cynically, some would argue), it’s not a bad idea to spin back to a lecture hall at U.C. Santa Barbara in 1976 and listen to a then-renowned wit describe his travels around the world, his philosophy of writing, and his associations with the Marx Brothers (for whom he wrote screenplays). Perelman was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker in the 1930s and 1940s (that gets short shrift in Manus’s play), and received an Oscar for his screenplay of Around the World in 80 Days (which gets longer shrift). He died three years after the lecture at UCSB that playwright Manus and Aaron fictionalize, under Judith Rose’s direction.
Much of the play underscores that the roots of the societal madness we’re now enduring were planted in the prior century (if not earlier), so that some of Perelman’s digs apply to us. Among the comic presumptions that the play establishes is that, despite his abundant accolades, none of the college students whom Perelman is addressing know who he is, or was.
At California State University where I teach in 2022, the mention of playwright Arthur Miller is met with blank stares. And so it goes. Time marches in, and even the best among us end up floating, almost anonymously, in the ether.
Among Perelman’s literary feats was using an early 20th century comic sketch format to parody sloppy thinking on multiple fronts. Though Manus skirts that accomplishment, it’s precisely what we see in the hands of so many political comics today. There’s some comfort in realizing that the contorted logic that plagues us has a long, ignoble tradition.
According to the play, Perelman was constantly running out of money and returning to Hollywood to refresh his coffers — a land run by thugs lacking both wit and taste, says Manus’s Perelman. And there’s something ennobling to hear Perelman decide, late in life, that he’d rather stick to his principles of crafted wordplay (Hollywood complained that his writing was too bookish) rather than pander to what he felt was a baser standard. His was the standard of a proud elitist, which could be reframed as his pursuit of excellence. You can think of that what you will.
The downside to all of this is Manus’s insistence on having Perelman deliver almost his entire lecture in the past tense — theme and variation on “and then I wrote . . .” — so that the retrospective format is at war with the often scintillating life episodes that he’s describing.
Aaron is clearly a skilled actor, but this performance is a staged reading, not a production. At times Aaron carries the script with him around the stage, setting it down for gulps of water; there’s also the sense that he’s partly unfamiliar with Manus’s script. Ends of sentences dangle on lengthy pauses, sending the impression that we’re in the middle of a rehearsal. There are some upsides to watching what looks like a production-in-development — process is often more intriguing than product — but it’s not billed as such.
I kept flashing back to Kurt Vonnegut’s 2007 lecture at Case Western Reserve College that was both autobiographical and a rumination on the core shapes of stories (focused primarily on Hamlet) that are universal — droll and funny, and in the present-tense. Vonnegut and Perelman were both brilliant American humorists, who spoke to the country from wildly different locations (Indiana versus New York). If Manus wants to bring Perelman even more to life, he might take a page from Vonnegut’s playbook.
Brickhouse Theatre, 10950 Peach Grove St., N. Hlywd.; Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 1:30 pm; thru July 17. https://brownpapertickets.org. Running time, 80 minutes without intermission
