Word: comic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Alchemist (by Ben Jonson; produced by the New York City Theatre Company) is an almost ostentatiously neglected comic masterpiece. It could, without doubt, be shorter. But 300 years after it was written and long after alchemy† went out of fashion, the play still teems with hard, bawdy, farcical fun; still gives that well-mated couple, greed and gullibility, a handsome thrashing; still rushes ahead with a plot that the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge adjudged "one of the three most perfect" in literature...
...point in the proceedings. As the Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter (K.C.B.), Green seemed to strike sort of a midway position between his clowning and mugging and magnificently individual stage business of "The Mikado" and the austere simplicity of "Pirates." Part of the time he was the scene-stealing comic; part of the time he was the ramrod-stiff First Lord of the Admiralty...
...After gossip columnists haughtily cried "Bad taste!" Ciro's nightclub in Hollywood banned Comic Peter Lind Hayes's newest skit. Hayes and his wife had been imitating President Truman and daughter Margaret. Hayes played the Missouri Waltz and pretended to sell neckties. His wife kept crying, "You're living in the past!" Said Hayes, answering his critics: "We tried it at the hardware convention in Cincinnati and they kept coming back night after night...
Many of these anecdotes have been told in affectionate recollections. But by some irony which James would have appreciated, even the most admiring of them, like Edmund Gosse's, make him seem a more comic figure than his enemies could...
Something was left out of the account, however. It is easy to imagine the Henry James so pictured as a mildly comic figure in London drawing rooms, but it is impossible to imagine such an individual writing The Beast in the Jungle or The Altar of the Dead. Author Nowell-Smith has traced through their mutations several of the famous inane or incredibly affected remarks attributed to James, by various writers, pointing to an unmistakable conclusion: they were apocryphal. James was a character. Anecdotes were attributed to him, the way jokes about monosyllabic New Englanders were attributed to Calvin Coolidge...