Word: absurdist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...media event with flowing blood and absurdist overtones. The aging Beat poet Allen Ginsberg chanted om in Lincoln Park. Jean Genet, the French homosexual playwright and ex-convict, wrote titillated prose about how attractive and powerful the cops' thighs were. Abbie Hoffman developed a cordial relationship with the plainclothes policemen assigned to tail him everywhere, but he shook them sometimes and spirited around town in a score of disguises...
...Steven Wright, 31, is one of the few young comics to depart from the Carlin-Klein-Leno style of observational humor. His offbeat, cerebral routines are a string of absurdist one-liners, delivered in a deadpan monotone. Examples: "I was once arrested for walking in someone else's sleep." "When I die, I'm going to leave my body to science fiction." "I was walking through a forest and a tree fell right in front of me, and I didn't hear it." Like many comedians with a shtick, Wright (who grew up near Leno in Massachusetts and also...
...While absurdist touches in the ficitionalizedannual report--like discussions of two-hour planetravel and mocking descriptions of the "longunimaginative Bok regime"--tempered the speech'simmediate impact, it has clearly touched a nervein the Harvard community. Bok said he has receivedunprecedented amounts of mail and alumni responsewhich has only recently abated...
That is also a good way to describe The Far Side, an absurdist, sometimes sinister world where animals do the unnatural (i.e., act like humans) and often trump mankind along the way. A female moose, in a slip and curlers, hands the phone to her husband, sitting in his easy chair. "It's the call of the wild," she says. As a woman crouches to feed nuts to two squirrels, one of the furry creatures says to his companion, "I can't stand it . . . They're so cute when they sit like that." Larson's humans fare no better when...
...uses this plot line not as a primary force, but as a cinematic exoskeleton under which the filmmaker can pit dueling concepts of American culture against each other. His tools are the carcasses of TSF's past, and the eagle-eyed student can detect flairs of John Hughes' best absurdist work, a soupcon of Risky Business's self-knowing psychological slant on civilization and its discontents, and a brief but illuminating pillaging of Woody Allen's treasure trove of neuroses (cf: post-tennis scene with Diane Keaton on her terrace in Annie Hall...