Word: absurdes
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...humor of the gag and the wise crack was confident, benign, a pick-me-up rather than a putdown. The new humor, which draws its tone from play wrights such as Albee and Pinter, is cruel, taut-nerved, and speaks the lingo of the obscene and the absurd, not funny-ha-ha but funny-peculiar. The new humor reigns in off-Broadway's Scuba Duba, a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman (Stern, A Mother's Kisses...
...rabbi, he uses an obsolescent language; yet he has the spiritual restlessness, the wry embarrassment at heroics, the ashy taste for the absurd that are so typical of modern writers. At the same time, the difference between Singer and the Jewish-American authors is the distance between the first and the second generations. However brilliant they may be at times, their Jewish tradition and color have a borrowed air; Singer's are genuine. Their characters, at large in American life, suffer alienation; his characters, alone in their closed world, triumph over isolation...
...adrenal flow of anxiety and guilt that contemporary audiences bring into the theater with them. Mirrored in his comedies of terror, playgoers can see the resurgence of their own childlike fears, sense their own sadomasochistic impulses, detect the image of themselves as pawns of chance in a chaotic and absurd cosmos...
...prospect of "victory" in Viet Nam [Sept. 22] fills me with dread. It would mean a continuation of the absurd philosophy that war can end war, a victory for militarists who would bring peace to mankind by killing him, and a further retreat into our paranoid delusion that we can spread brotherhood and love by filling the world with soldiers and guns...
...deployment of the ABM system [Sept. 22] is not only an indication of the present Administration's absurd penchant for wasting tax dollars, but a grave crime against man's will to survive. It will likely open the way to vaster, more absurd mechanizations of defense. If it is never used, the magnitude of such a dead investment will reproach mankind in its folly for generations to come. If it is employed, it will not even protect urban areas; we may die with the satisfaction of knowing that most of "them" will be just as dead. I cannot...