Word: absurdes
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...company of heroes, soliloquizing that "it is necessary to struggle, to be embattled, to be knocked down and to have to get up." Look at history's great leaders, he says. They have all trod the wilderness at times. Churchill, De Gaulle, Adenauer. If the audience thinks such comparisons absurd, clearly the comedian does not; that is the purity of the comedy. But, whatever it may think, the audience does not laugh -- at this or at anything he says ("That's a new tape recorder") -- because under the still alive scorn, the still alive paranoia, lives the embodiment of resilience...
Some tempers cracked under the strain of the early hour, letting out signs of patriotic fervor. "That's an absurd rule. Isn't that what the Revolution was about?" said one man, angered by the demands of a security officer in 18th-century uniform that he stay behind the ropes...
...flirts with prejudice, daring it out of its cave. He is the only presidential candidate who can say ain't without being considered ignorant except by the ignorant: "We makin' what ain't nobody buyin'." More than most politicians, he has a sense of the absurd in a campaign, and cannot resist making jokes as well as history (as he proved during his surreal day with Silo Sam). Though he has resolved not to criticize other Democrats, an occasional mocking touch comes through. At last year's Congressional Black Caucus, the master of ceremonies did an elaborate dance to slip...
...cool on Venus." Will we blow ourselves up? Probably not: "We shall abolish nuclear weapons, not by a sudden outburst of peace and goodwill but by a slow process of erosion. The weapons will be abolished as the missions for which they were designed come to seem unnecessary or absurd." And what of tinkering around with life in test tubes? Dyson issues a warning: "Genetic engineering must stop short of monkeying around irresponsibly with the species Homo sapiens." Beyond that restriction, beneficent marvels proliferate: "There are no laws of physics and chemistry which say that potatoes cannot grow on trees...
THERE are two sides to the work of Nikolai Gogol, one lighthearted and delightfully absurd, the other darker, crueler and obsessive to the point of madness. Director Christopher Duff manages to display through two short pieces, The Nose and From a Madman's Diary, both sides of Gogol's talent with out losing the peculiar, manic sensibility that unites the whole of his canon...