Word: absurdity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most amazing characteristics of Lloyd's brand of comedy is his ability to make the most of an absurd situation. The pathetic Harold that tries so hard to commit suicide - unsuccessfully - or bring home an armful of groceries to his wife is great comedy. Even the joy ride in the new Model T with the family is so wrought with misfortune and peculiar circumstance that laughter is uncontrollable...
...Spoleto stage, sipping scotch, now and again crying out gleefully, relishing the repugnance of his new creations. Lest anyone misunderstand them, he contributed a program note: "If the play achieves even partially its artistic intention, you will find it possible to pity this female clown even while her absurd pretentions and her panicky last effort to hide from her final destruction make you laugh...
...world is neither significant nor absurd," Robbe-Grillet says. "It simply is." No novelist can now add anything new to the understanding of today's world as a whole, or man's place in it. Instead, it is the event itself that the novelist wants to convey, not its meaning; human gestures -not the motive behind them, the actual state of mind of an individual, the exact curve of a particular experience, the exact look of a room, a painting, a city. Plot is a diversion. People are so used to wondering who gets the girl that they...
These places have become training grounds for a host of jobs that agencies outside the university could prepare for more efficiently and cheaply, Eble maintains. He thinks the credit system "absurd" and "largely responsible for the size of the university bureaucracy today." Students spend too much time "clambering over the machinery." "Indulgences are sold in popular units of 3 hours per semester, and salvation is granted at 128 hours...
...fear seems absurd, considering not only U.S. pledges but U.S. self-interest, but the French cling to it. They know that a small nuclear force of their own could neither prevent nor successfully retaliate against a Soviet nuclear strike; but, should the "pause" ever occur, the French could force Washington's hand by the use of even limited nuclear weapons. In other words, they could leave the U.S. no choice but to finish what the French had started...