Word: cliches
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Beyond the Fringe is an explosion of literate joy. Its four high-IQ British imps skewer clichés and milk sacred cows for irreverent merriment. The chief scholar-clown, Dr. Jonathan Miller, is a droll, gravity-defying pixy for whom a new vocabulary of humor will have to be invented...
Brown, trying to turn the Communism issue against Nixon, claims that the former Vice President "is dealing in panic," that Nixon is simply rereading the same script that got him elected to Congress in 1946 and to the Senate in 1950. "Clichés like this went out with 'whizbang' and the Stutz Bearcat," cries Brown. But Pat is careful to advocate an expansion of anti-Communism teaching in the schools "in a nonhysterical atmosphere...
Kiss in the Dark. Toby Withers, a hulking middle-aged epileptic, is given to holding little talks with his dead mother, compulsively wets his bed and picks his nose, afterward, as Miss Frame relentlessly reports, "peering curiously at the little blobs of salvage." Irishman Pat Keenan talks in obsessive clichés about the threat of "foreigners and blacks," is too troubled by nightmarish fear of the Blessed Virgin to get married. Ex-Schoolteacher Zoe Bryce broods endlessly upon her first kiss, which occurred when she was 37. It was perpetrated by an unshaven seaman who crept...
...crucifixion or two thrown in. A feast at the Villa of Crassus provided an excuse for a seduction scene (by Ballerina Natalia Ryzhenko) and some writhing by 15 Cadiz dancing girls, all of them bare considerably south of the navel. Khatchaturian's thunderous score omitted scarcely a single cliché of film music, and not even Plisetskaya was equal to the absurdities of her role as Spartacus' wife. As Spartacus himself, the Bolshoi introduced a giant (Dmitry Begak) who danced just about the way a giant might be expected...
...This led me to wonder what it would be like if I made a cartoon that looked like a cartoon." In addition to cartoons-on-canvas, he began painting household objects-trash cans, washing machines, light cords-in the same flat technique. "I try to use what is a cliche -a powerful cliché-and put it into organized form," he says. By presenting common things, familiar to commercial art, in a different context, Lichtenstein, a onetime window-dresser, argues that he is creating something new. "It brings up the question 'What is art?' " says...