A Farewell to Omsk

I love to read humor columns, funny stories, jokes--things that make me laugh.

One of my favorite humorists is S.J. Perelman. He wrote for The New Yorker and Hollywood movies from the 1930's (he died in 1979). I love his clever wit, unparalleled vocabulary, and literary playfulness. His writing can be a little cynical, caustic, and arrogant at times, but reading his work makes me go out of my way to look up words because I want to understand his humor. Here are a few phrases that I think are stand-alone funny that I collected from books I've read.

Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nations laws.

(Girls) eat a spoonful of yogurt when they're alone, but when your buying, man it's like Thanksgiving.

Kalbfus laughed uproariously, less at the witticism than because this was the first time anyone had addressed him in three days.

A: Then why are you staring at those clouds so pensively?
B: Perhaps I am more cirrus-minded than the other girls.

I noticed that she was eating a small umbrella-shaped object and asked her what it was. "An umbrella," she replied shortly.

It is a confessional in which dentists take down their back hair and stammer out the secrets of their craft.

I wouldn't duplicate that experience for all of the rubies in the Shwe Dagon Pagoda. Just in a matter of speaking, that is. If anybody wants to talk a deal, I can be in Rangoon in two days.

For all I knew, they might be the most odious of companions--Texas oil tycoons or social butterflies from Pasadena or football enthusiasts: crashing bores of the kind who range the world solely in search of victims