Ours is a society spilling over with disposable forms of entertainment. From viral videos to fleeting memes, YouTube, Twitter, and other social-media platforms provide a constellation of time-wasting choices.

Of course, quick, relatively undemanding amusements are not a new phenomenon, nor must they be a pernicious one. Popular songs, light verse, and newspaper comic strips are all legitimate forms intended for rapid consumption rather than sustained contemplation. Equally valid and lasting — though far less widely consumed than whatever is floating around on social media — is the sort of short-form light humor mastered by the writers associated with the old, Harold Ross–edited New Yorker magazine, including, most spectacularly and surreally, S. J. Perelman. To read Perelman’s pieces now as diversion, as millions once did, may seem a quaint affectation, but a case for the pure, uncomplicated pleasure they provide is made anew in an indispensable gathering of his work from the Library of America.

Existing in some ill-defined genre that is not quite fiction, essay, or squib, Perelman’s “sketches and satires,” as they are called here, most often take as their subject the flotsam and jetsam of American popular culture, of which the writer was an avid consumer and a trenchant, though elegant, parodist. “He reads junk and good things interchangeably, and never forgets a single turn: Sax Rohmer’s absurd Fu Manchu stories, Elinor Glyn’s sensual overexcitements, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s ornate Tarzan tales are his reading, along with Twain and Conrad, and of course behind them hover the club and detective literature of London,” writes Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker writer who edited the present volume, in an introduction.

Perelman’s elaborate, curlicued prose style is packed with puns, references ordinary and extraordinary, and non sequiturs amusing and baffling. Surely he is among the few humorists in any age to admit to the influence of James Joyce. “Not sentences alone, but entire paragraphs as beautifully and intricately constructed as a Rube Goldberg machine, with cliché backing into argot flirting with Broadway slang, Yiddish and British pretension side by side,” Gopnik writes. “He was one of the best pure writers in American English. He still is.”

Perelman, who was born in Brooklyn in 1904 but reared and educated in Providence, R.I., cut his comic teeth at Brown University, where he first contributed cartoons to and later served as the editor of the humor magazine The Brown Jug. In 1925, having failed to earn enough credits to graduate, Perel­man became a staff cartoonist at Judge, then co-edited by Harold Ross. Five years later, he began writing for Ross at The New Yorker, inaugurating an association that lasted to Perelman’s death in 1979.

During his lifetime, Perelman’s pieces were pulled together into numerous well-selling book-length compendiums. He also wrote plays and contributed, credited and otherwise, to film scripts, adding appropriate notes of anarchy to the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932) and winning an Oscar for co-writing Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Yet despite this torrent of bylines, he never produced a major standalone work of fiction; in 1930, he co-wrote a long-forgotten novel, Parlor, Bedlam and Bath. Much later, a planned memoir — The Hindsight Saga, whose title, typically, inexplicably, made humorous reference to John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga — failed to progress beyond a few fragments.

Can a career made up of so many stray bits and pieces withstand the test of time? In fact, Gopnik’s selection suggests that Perelman’s achievement ought not to be measured in terms of his failure to produce a Big Book but in his sustained, methodical commitment to, and mastery of, his own admittedly modest form.

Regarded in toto, his body of work clearly reflects a lifetime of writerly care. “It’s never been easy for me, and it gets progressively harder,” Perelman said of the act of writing, in a 1973 interview with public-television host James Day. He added, with a note of pride, “The old chestnut about ‘easy writing makes hard reading,’ I think, is still applicable.”

In fact, Perelman’s best pieces have the sort of twists, turns, and instances of corkscrew logic that can result only from honest effort. For example, the 1943 piece “Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Enough!” takes the long way around to reach its eventual subject: Perelman’s appreciation of the soppy, sleazy stories once found in romance magazines. Our narrator opens with a scene so romantic — “A pair of pigeons were cooing gently directly beneath my window; two squirrels plighted their troth in a branch overhead” — that, he says, it might well have been staged by director Ernst Lubitsch, he of “the Lubitsch touch.” Since Perelman is always willing to sacrifice common sense to pay off a joke, he continues by admitting that, yes, this was being overseen by the great director: “In fact, Lubitsch himself was seated on a bench across the street, smoking a cucumber and looking as cool as a cigar.” (The scrambling of clichés is vintage S.J.)

There follows Perelman’s expert exegesis on romantic fiction, which proves how fully he had absorbed his subject. “It is hardly surprising that when these golden lads and lasses finally have at one another, they produce an effect akin to the interior of a blast furnace,” he writes of scenes in such fiction in which the lovers’ passion is consummated.

For his famous Raymond Chandler send-up, the masterly “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer,” from 1944, Perel­man conjured a hard-boiled style at once true to its source and pushing it beyond all bounds of plausibility. “I came down the sixth-floor corridor of the Arbogast Building, past the World Wide Noodle Corporation, Zwinger & Rumsey, Accountants, and the Ace Secretarial Service, Mimeographing Our Specialty,” the story, breathlessly, opens. It’s the sort of piece in which characters are given recognizable stock lines on the order of “I might talk for a grand” but also one in which a dame’s blouse is said to have been “designed by some master craftsman, some Cézanne of the shears.”

Examples of Perelman’s “Cloudland Revisited” series of pieces, in which the writer gave fresh appraisals of books or films that meant something to him when he was younger, include a rumination on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan stories (“Insofar as the topography of Rhode Island and my physique permitted, I modelled myself so closely on Tarzan that I drove the community to the brink of collapse”) and D. W. Griffith’s silent film Way Down East, a cinematic masterpiece that, in Perelman’s account, is made to sound faintly ludicrous, down to the unnaturally unruffled hair of leading man Richard Barthelmess: “Cockney bruisers beat the daylights out of Barthelmess, bullying mates kicked him down hatchways and flailed him with marlinspikes, and Papuans boiled him in kettles, but he always looked as though he had just emerged from the Dawn Patrol Barbershop.”

Perelman was a wit par excellence even when he was off duty, as in passages from his aborted memoir. In one section, he remembers the precarious state of his career prior to being hired by the Marx Brothers: “I started receiving a trickle of letters from the bank that soon grew into a cascade. Perhaps, its officials hinted delicately, I would like to transfer to some bank that had facilities for handling smaller accounts.” His waggishness remains intact in private correspondence, a smattering of which is included here. Writing to Frances and Albert Hackett, Perelman de­scribes a lazy Sunday afternoon in Dublin: “There are 4,238 churches within one mile of where I’m sitting (sorry, where I’m afther sitting), and that part of the population which isn’t macerating itself inside them is closeted in the pubs.” More seriously, he attempted to dissuade his daughter Abby from taking Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment too much to heart: “For all the woe implied in the lives of those characters, you only have to look about you to see that people can enjoy themselves and laugh and rise above their adversities” — a sensible justification of his own work.

In his introduction, Gopnik adopts a defensive posture about Perelman’s seemingly dated cultural context, arguing, properly, that “we enjoy satire more when we don’t know the things being satirized — and so cannot protest their portrayal — and depend on the satirist for all our information, both for the ground and for the graffiti he scrawls upon it.” That much seems clear; after all, Swift’s A Modest Proposal hits home even for those unfamiliar with 18th-century Ireland.

In the end, Perelman’s particular gift for exaggeration, embellishment, and continually upping the comic ante — in a chapter from his book Acres and Pains, he recounts a series of increasingly less believable attempts to unload his home in rural Pennsylvania before reporting that he has lowered himself to asking strangers, “Psst, brother, want to buy a hot farm?” — wears well in any season, and none more so than our own, when we have so many ways to pass the time but so few that truly strengthen our funny bone.