Master of His Universe : FICTION : THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN,<i> By Bruce Jay Friedman (Donald I. Fine: $25; 400 pp)</i>

Bruce Jay Friedman appeared on the fiction scene in the early 1960s, one of a number of young American writers (Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme) herded by critics into the corral of “black humor.” He made his mark with novels (“Stern,” “A Mother’s Kisses”) and went on to plays (“Steambath”) and screenplays (“Stir Crazy,” “Splash”). But for many, it was Friedman’s short stories, published in an eclectic range of periodicals (Cavalier, Esquire, Playboy, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, the Transatlantic Review), that lingered longest in memory.

Now, nearly four dozen of those tales are gathered in one welcome volume providing an opportunity to appreciate the range of this writer’s achievement.

Friedman early displayed a flair for bizarre comedy. Several of these “greatest hits” open windows on a weirdly funny world. “Black Angels” has a morose fellow named Stefano finding the perfect analyst in the person of his gardener-handyman. In “Detroit Abe,” an assistant professor of irony at a city university is offered the chance to take over a pimp’s stable. “A Change of Plan” for a newlywed involves leaving his bride and pursuing a teenage blond met on his honeymoon.

With such plots, Friedman was a natural for Hollywood. His pieces were made into movies (“Detroit Abe” became “Dr. Detroit,” “A Change of Plan” turned into “The Heartbreak Kid”), and Friedman got rich material for further short stories. His accounts of East Coast screenwriters suffering L.A. indignities (like the pitch-perfect “An Ironic Yetta Montana”) are some of the best since S.J. Perelman’s.

As a fantasist, with tales of alternate universes and tricky bargains, Friedman often held his own with the likes of John Collier. Just as often, though, the comedy came too easily. A lot of entries now seem mere riffs, shaggy-dog jokes good only for a few laughs in a magazine.

But when Friedman is not compulsively joking around, he can write short stories with the best of his generation.

The “serious” Friedman protagonist generally fits within these parameters: male, New York-born, Jewish or Italian, with a dapper father and an excruciatingly boisterous mom. His parents are of an age to fondly remember Brian Aherne, George Raft and Tommy Dorsey. He matures in time for the Korean conflict, attends college in the Midwest (Thurber’s heartland gone berserk), then finds creative work of a sort, often in the entertainment business. Marriage usually snares him, but not forever and never tightly. The shapely form of a younger woman can almost always lure him from a wife or a steady girl, and “hookers” are a lifelong indulgence. He labors hard to escape the bounds of his parents’ gestalts, only to find as a husband and father that he’s oddly retracing their patterns.

Some of Friedman’s best works involve the recurring character of Harry Towns, a middlingly successful screenwriter with a lingering cocaine habit, a penchant for gambling and a roomful of unopened emotional baggage. Five Towns episodes are in this volume, including “Lady,” which unsparingly and brilliantly describes Harry’s love affair with coke; “The Partners,” in which he takes his 10-year-old son for a strained vacation in Las Vegas; “Back to Back,” where Towns deals (or fails to deal) with the deaths of his parents; and “Pitched Out,” which finds an aging Towns hustling script assignments from a ‘90s generation of studio executives (‘One of these days he was going to grab one of them and say, ‘Congratulations on your youth.’ ”).

In the Towns episodes and in several others (“The Golden Years,” “The Icing on the Cake,” “Wonderful Golden Rule Days,” “The Enemy”), Friedman strikes a tone all his own, at once intimate and distanced. These are classics of their kind, stories that capture specific experience in timeless fashion.

And then once in a while Friedman peels the mask back even further, the better to show the rictus of pain beneath the constant joker’s grin. Such an instance is “The Trip,” in which a college-bound son, on impulse and “with a little smile,” exacts an awful revenge on the mother who’s insisted on accompanying him to his university town. Deadpan-bleak, “The Trip” can stand comparison with the work of such modern masters of the short form as William Trevor.

With his dozen best, with another dozen or so wild inventions and with a bonus handful of off-the-wall tours de force (like “Let’s Hear It for a Beautiful Guy,” a wicked “tribute” to Sammy Davis, Jr.), Bruce Jay Friedman has earned a place on the permanent shelf of contemporary American letters. May a new host of readers discover his considerable gifts.