Word: absurdist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ahead and laugh, if you like. Of course there's something a bit comical about the scenario, shades of Portnoy or of Bruce Jay Friedman. Even more comical to remember that some girl in the dorm, a transfer student with more than the ordinary romantic-absurdist delusions about Harvard men, had seen the naked stranger wandering around the dorm all evening, but figured that he was only someone's boyfriend having himself a good time...
...school of drama approach. Everything is played for a laugh: the broadcast techniques of burlesque and vaudeville. Bob Hope-like gag timing, facial mugging, and borsht-belt delivery make for a jolly evening in the theatre. Unfortunately, this has transformed Godot from the blackest and best of our existential absurdist dramas into a Marx Brothers romp...
...University of New Mexico, dissenting students fought with "straights" over whether the flag should be lowered to half-staff to honor the Kent State dead. Three of the dissenters came away with knife wounds. One confrontation at U.C.L.A. was often something of an absurdist frolic, with students advancing on and retreating from the police?the "blue meanies"?in a sort of Keystone Kops ballet. Police would chase kids frantically past heedless couples smooching on benches. When one shift of police went off duty, the students shouted: "Manatia, pigs!" A cop would smile and wave goodbye...
...paragraphs to pick up the trail again. For the nation watching, it was an instant of complex psychology. There was the acute embarrassment and sympathy for the speaker who has fluffed his lines. There was also, for some, an eccentric half hope that if he could not continue, an absurdist, McLuhan logic would apply: "The U.S. was about to move into Cambodia, but the President lost his place in the script...
...record, this comedy, if you can call it that, is a bastard child of absurdist theatre. It is a play about everything and nothing. Before the evening draws to its long-awaited close we hear aphorisms about God. free will, existence, time space. love, and yes, death. Nothing is real. Everything is real. We are alive. We are dead... All this is fine, but we have heard it before. In the best absurdist plays, it has been sung...