Word: absurdist
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...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...
Apartheid is the ineradicable stench in the air of their mean home, but their squabble for power within those walls is neither didactic nor particularly political. The wry, absurdist humor recalls Beckett, and the inchoate sense of menace parallels Pinter. The candor of the final confessional between the brothers is Fugard's own. At Yale, as in the original, Fugard has directed and plays the half-derelict, fair-skinned brother. At the outset he seems fragile, ineffectual, on the border of madness. As the narrative focuses on the implications of his relative whiteness, he gathers strength and wisdom. Zakes Mokae...
...sheer passage of time has helped to heal some wounds. But it has left a certain fatalism. In Viet Nam, the G.I.'s absurdist, shrugging slogan was "It don't mean nuthin'." Today Jim Garnett, a Seattle carpenter who served as an Army supply clerk, says, "It was just something we all went through. Like when you were a kid and your old man comes home drunk at night. He wakes everybody up, everybody knows what's going on, and it makes everyone real uncomfortable. But in the morning, no one talked about...