Insert Flap "A" and Throw Away - S.J. Perelman

Title: Insert Flap "A" and Throw Away

Author: S.J. Perelman

Insert Flap “A” and Throw Away is a humorous essay by S.J. Perelman, a 20th century writer and humorist. His piece is a fiction with an unknown time or place. It is written to simply entertain the reader – it seems Perelman’s goal is to get a chuckle from his audience. The writing seems to be intended for anyone willing to take a look at it – though one could say that it is meant for people looking to laugh.

The story is a narration, an account of the main character’s shortcomings. From the beginning until the final few paragraphs, the narrator (who writes in first person) tries teaching groups of children how to build various items: the “Jiffy-Cloz” and “Self-Running 10-Inch Scale Model Delivery Truck Construction Kit,” for example. Unfortunately, every single attempt ends in failure.

Perelman writes using satire – in the first paragraph when introducing the first thing he fails to build, he writes that he learned, “the shortest, cheapest method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected” (paragraph 1) This sets the reader up for an interesting story, to say the least. He uses dialogue to add a more personal dimension. He asks a child to hand him a knife but the child refuses for safety reasons. The narrator gets a knife on his own a sentence later, the book reads that the narrator is “in the bathroom grinding his teeth in agony and attempting to stanch the flow of blood” (paragraph 11). Little, unexpected moments like these keep Perelman’s piece exciting.

In the very end, the narrator wakes up. It turns out that he has been in some sort of mental institution and he was dreaming. The story ends with the doctor instructing that the man does some exercises with his hands – exactly what seems to have gotten him into trouble in the first place.

The author is successful in accomplishing his purpose, which was really just to make the reader laugh. There were several moments where I had to reread sentences because they were so ridiculous. Using a very informal tone, S.J. Perelman writes a unique, memorable, cliff-hanging essay.

Nightmare... or reality?