Word: absurder
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...student who wants to help pay his own way through college $599 is an absurd figure at which to stop: even state university expenses far outweigh this. But stop he must. Unless his salary is either fantastically high or lasts throughout the year, the student worker often loses money by carning above that mark. In addition to his tax on salary above $600, his guardian must pay a sizable sum when the student is no longer classified as a dependent...
...Attorney General Herbert Brownell, it seems absurd and dangerous to let spies "go unwhipped of justice" behind that shield. Brownell's campaign for a law that "would allow the Government to use wiretap evidence to prove its espionage cases" has touched off a wiretapping controversy, and one result of it is likely to be the passage of a wiretapping bill at the next session of Congress...
Hovering in the background of all this, is Vivian's widowed mother, an alcoholic since the death of the daughter who despised her ("My bird, my bird" . . . "She hopped from the cliff like a cricket"). Miss Dunnock seems uncertain whether she should be tragic or pitifully absurd, as she flings hot-dogs around the stage and talks of the husband who never loved her. In any case, she gets little sympathy, least of all from Mrs. Eastman Cuevas, who tells the widow who clutches her hysterically and begs her not to leave: "Stop brooding!", a line reminiscent of Charles Addams...
...humor of this comedy depends much more on the acting than on the plot. To actor and audience the plot is absurd, but if the enthusiasm of the performers were credible, the drollery of the whole production would succeed. Director Charles Chrishten has spread looks of Zeal over the faces of his cast like make up. Unlike cosmetics, however, Chrichton's technique never comes off. One never believes that the people of Titfield are sincerely ecstatic when talking about their two car Zephyr. And worse, one hardly cares. The most amusing lines and a few way pokes at British socialism...
Unfortunately, the other three prose attempts do not measure up to the first two. Taking a poor third, is one of those Daisy-turned-Gridder things that can be funny only at high school football banquets. And then there's "The Peanuts Myth" that uses the reductio ad absurd to no great advantage. This particular one involves nineteenth-century Ivy athletes playing football in motorized wheelchairs. Hindmost in the magazine and in humor is "Informality at Yale," an ironic title because John H. Limpert says that the Yale men "Gothic town" do not have much informality. An "Old College Song...