Insert Flap “A” and Throw Away – S.J. Perelman

S.J. Perelman’s essay, Insert Flap “A” and Throw Away is full of humor, as the title entails. His entire purpose is to entertain readers who struggle with following directions and feel the need to improvise as they go on, just like he does. He amuses the readers by describing a particular Christmas morning in which he had to assemble a cardboard toy. It sounds easy, but chaos ensues when Perelman begins to put the pieces together. Perelman attended Brown University and moved on to write many popular collections that were famously humorous. He was awarded an Oscar in 1956 because of that same humor for his screenplay of Around the World in Eighty Days.

Perelman used several rhetorical devices to amuse his audience, one of which was humor. This doesn’t seem surprising and is expected, as it is what he is most well-known for. After his ordeal in failing to assemble the toy truck correctly, he describes himself being “on [his] hands and knees, bunting the infernal thing along with [his] nose and whinnying, ‘Roll, confound you, roll!’” (Perelman 189). Perelman gives the reader a visual of a grown man on his hands and knees, using his face to push a poorly constructed toy truck along the floor. Not only do kids get a laugh out of this silly moment, but adults, too, can enjoy this story of a silly parent trying to amuse their children. Perelman indeed accomplished his purpose in entertaining his readers because of the rhetorical devices he used, another being satire. He describes a different scene in which he is assembling a closet called the “Jiffy-Cloz” and has yet more embarrassing troubles with the process. When he finds trouble in assembling the contraption, Perelman finds later that “the Jiffy-Cloz people cunningly omit four of the staples necessary to finish the job” (Perelman 186). Now he is blaming manufacturers of their failure to provide all the correct materials in order to make up for the inconveniences he faced. Perelman gives his audience a laugh from his satire, evidently entertaining them.

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