Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...into the Met like hungry hawks. Much of what they had to say was deserved. Yet, for a nation where opera has been in a low state for many years, some of the criticism seemed downright tendentious. Le Monde found Barber "an ungainly spectacle." The orchestra "lacked finesse," the "comic effects were so broad that they seemed destined for a public with numb wits." Perhaps the most devastating crack of all came from France-Soir. Describing Soprano Peters' singing, Critic Jean Cotte wrote: "At each note America was risking another Pearl Harbor." Paris' bargain-basement Met, concluded Cotte...
...Westward is the latest fictional flotsam on this tide. It is a pointed little farce, and as cultural anthropology it offers a thoughtful thesis to such British and American minds as can rise above the trousers-pants hassle. The Englishman in the U.S., it demonstrates, is no longer a comic figure known for his arrogance, social pretension, accent or what not. He is a switched-off, not-with-it fellow whose vague uncertainties about the liberal vision of life reflect the diminished horizons of the once Empire, and whose ineptitude in lifemanship contrasts sadly with the unshaken conviction of Americans...
...novel is a lot of fun, but it is hard to make a real hero emerge from a blizzard of custard pies; Kingsley Amis (One Fat Englishman), scored better in the U.S. Besides, not many native readers will share the conviction that American activities are inherently comic because they are un-English...
...from Brooklyn jumped from dropout to drummer to boxer to dancer. By the time he settled on his name and his occupation, there was nowhere to go but up to the Catskills, where the jokes, like the soup du jour, are always borscht. Notwithstanding the ethnic limitations of comic performance in the borscht belt, King kept plugging, waited to be discovered...
...best he generates images like the navel of the demiurge itself. And the images reflect ideas. Gass is a trained thinker, a professor of philosophy at Purdue University, and in this fable he enlivens the weary old war between good and evil with curt communiqués and rakingly comic crossfire...