Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that most bewildering of American phenomena, the inaugural parade, a fixture that comes so naturally to a spectacle-loving public that few people ever think to question its necessity or its form. Yet there it was, with all the oomph and oompah, the crashing brass, the flights of unwitting comic relief, the displays of acrobatics, the precision marching, the dimpled knees and limber legs, the earnest faces of the young people who had come from all over the nation...
Scene of the crime is an improbable Manhattan town house where Cartoonist Lemmon, abetted by his man Friday, Terry-Thomas, draws a James Bondish comic strip called Bash Brannigan. The place is a boy's garden of sex and violence. "No gay little chintzes, no big gunky lamps, the complete absence of a woman's touch," gloats Terry-Thomas. But one night at a bachelor dinner, someone wheels in a gigantic cake that gives forth a frosted blonde (Virna Lisi), and Lemmon, anesthetized by alcohol, begins to chew his cheeks like a man cutting a sweet tooth...
...sampling of Molière is worth a skullful of most playwrights. Molière was the god of common sense. While tragedy moves from sanity toward madness, comedy moves from madness toward sanity. In his pride, the tragic hero overreaches human limits and dies. In his folly, the comic hero ludicrously pounds his head against those limits, is brought to his senses and lives. It is difficult to know which is the less comforting end-death or self-knowledge, and that is one reason why great tragedy and great comedy are so close...
...Squares. On the propaganda and persuasion level, though, the mills were grinding. Dr. Terry noted that 350,000 copies of his report were distributed during the year. And the American Cancer Society sent out 10 million copies of a comic-book insert addressed to teenagers, Smoking Is for Squares...
Dick Shawn and Joan Hackett are admirable foils. He paints the clown-husband character with broad vaudevillian brush strokes. She is a comic pointilliste, and her precise inflections of wifeliness dot the brain like a quiver of hatpins. Peterpat sometimes gets enveloped in the vapors of farce, but one deep breath of comic wisdom animates it-marriage is as funny as hell...