Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...haggles with miserly and drunken aristocrats for their dead serfs (listed on the government tax rolls as alive) so that he may pose as a propertied man, float a mortgage loan, and make a fashionable marriage. Just as murder is war in miniature, Gogol's Chichikov is a comic common cold symbolizing all the perennial tragic sicknesses of Russia-but not in this hammy production. It looks as though the Soviet Establishment decided that when a masterpiece bites, one has to pull its satiric teeth...
...unique signature on the times. They are rogue talents, unpredictable, disturbing and powerfully individual. Thus they form no cohesive school or even a wave. Nonetheless, critics of late have taken to calling them "black humorists," which is probably as good a tag as any. Among them are such comic writers as Bruce Jay Friedman and Joseph Heller, both of whose first novels were bestsellers. They also include such gifted but less widely read novelists as John Barth and James Purdy; they are perhaps best known for names like Terry Southern, Warren Miller and J. P. Donleavy...
...liveliest black humor, though they can hardly meet Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan's criterion that such satire is successful only if at least a third of the audience stalks out in anger. Dick Gregory of course is the black black humorist. Lenny Bruce, the sick, beat comic who is currently appealing his conviction in New York City for obscene monologues, is still admired by some black humorists as a symbol of "total commitment," though in recent years his commitment to satire has seemed to degenerate into a monotonous self-destructive scatology...
...have to think about the movie after it's over, to replay the scenes in your mind, and try to remember why it was that you never actually laughed at the comic touches, why the pathos was never depressing. Then you may begin to think, as I do, that The Fiances is the finest movie you have ever seen...
Good writing is rare enough. Storytelling is an even rarer skill. A genuinely comic vision is beyond price. The Ordways has all three. Seven years after his doom-laden first novel, Home from the Hill, William Humphrey has made a surprising switch from tragedy to mock epic. The result is the most delightful novel so far this winter...