Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Gus Edson, 65, cartoonist, who in 1935 switched from sports on the New York Daily News to comic strips when he took over The Gumps after the death of its creator, Sidney Smith, for the next 25 years kept the noisy ("Oh, Mini"), argumentative family (Andy, Min, Uncle Bim and Momma De Stross) yelling happily at one another until its popularity waned and he turned exclusively to Dondi, the sentimental story of an Italian waif in the U.S., currently in 138 newspapers; of a heart attack; in Stamford, Conn...
Despite clever barbs and lucent epigrams ("Respect is the only successful aphrodisiac"), Any God Will Do is not as acidly funny as it keeps promising to be. In the past, Condon cultists have been treated to comic narrative leaps performed with the agility of a Macedonian goat, and to sly surrealistic glimpses into the lives of Oedipal wrecks and decent drudges who turn up naked at the Last Judgment. But in this book much of the elan is gone; it sometimes appears as if Condon is padding to keep from plotting. Besides, he seems to hold his nose...
When Flanders & Swann dropped their first hat in the States, I was still lolling under the appleboughs. (Was Eisenhower president then?) There seemed to me no one more laughworthy in those days -- except maybe Jules Feiffer. Next to Bernard Mergendieler, no comic creation was "righter" than Flanders' young cannibal who decided, one day, that "eatin' people is wrong." Well, I guess I thought George Gobel was pretty funny...
Battleships are majestic, destroyers are dashing, submarines are sinister -but LSTs (landing ship, tank) are slow, clumsy, ugly, and somehow faintly comic. Lieut. Jake Adler, who commands LST 1826 as it bobs between Naples and Anzio during World War II, is an easygoing skipper who runs an exceedingly loose and happy ship. All the 99 officers and men aboard could have stepped right out of an old MGM movie. In fact, after a while, the reader begins to wish that a Mr. Roberts would appear to toss the captain's palm tree overboard, or that Skipper Adler would start...
William Congreve's Love For Love is an elegantly seditious play. Amidst all its comic intricacies and balanced construction are some just plain nasty cracks. "Honor is a public enemy, conscience, a domestic thief," we are told, and we shouldn't be too comfortable about the situation. At the play's end true love is rewarded, and the greed, lechery and feigning of feeling which have been smirked at as the keystones of Congreve's society are taken almost seriously and punished. Righteous sons rebuke their fathers and everybody does a curtain frug...