Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Elaine May is a corrosively perceptive satirist with a mean comic punch. Her off-Broadway one-acter Adaptation, the first of a double bill completed by Terrence McNally's Next, makes one laugh till it hurts, partly because the ache of recognition is in every line and situation. She has the wit to see that if Pavlov's dogs salivated at the tinkle of bells signifying food, modern man is not so very different. He salivates at psychological flash cards marked Emotional Maturity, Identity Crisis, Making a Commitment, as well as at traditional cues for action such...
Miss May has apparently been majoring in stagecraft. As the neophyte director of her own play, she shows herself to be an accomplished pro, with a crisp and zany comic flair. From Gabriel Dell, the hero who plays the adaptation game from birth to death, she elicits a performance that is laugh-and letter-perfect. Expressions cross his face like clouds scudding across the sky: hope, bewilderment, apprehension, chagrin, humiliation, and wild fleeting moments of joy. It is the year of the loser, on and off Broadway: Dustin Hoffman in Jimmy Shine, Woody Allen in Play It Again...
...dressed in a yellow piece of chiffon stuck together with three safety pins. The model also acts a little camera-shy, probably because she has no bra on. "Good evening," huffs Hef. "I'm Hugh Hefner. Welcome to the party." On one typical show the two comic acts were Shari Lewis, a ventriloquist who looks like a Playboy bunny, and a duo called Yvonne Wilder and Jack Colvin-a sort of Skid Row Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The singers were Buddy Greco and Johnny Janis. Janis made history of sorts by being the first singer to perform...
...wore a huge papier-mache Richard Nixon head. Mid-finale, Jones apologized "if we've offended anybody," and the cast broke into This Land Is My Land. The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (CBS) is a revival of the summer-substitute show starring Citybilly Singei Campbell (TIME, Jan. 31). Comic Pal Paulsen usually pops in, and the result is pleasantly unobjectionable. Particularly refreshing is the lack of overproduction numbers and the lighting psychedelia now in vogue. The same could not be said of This Is Tom Jones (ABC), a variety bill headlined by a Welsh baritone in the soul...
...Womb Existence. With this sardonically bittersweet tragedy, the book begins to shift from a comic, rather hip tale into a complex and moving novel with sharp historic resonances. The grieving Graff delves into Siggy's notebooks, which contain a somewhat fictional history of his parents and of the marks laid upon their lives by experiences during and immediately after World War II in Yugoslavia and Austria. Siggy calls these notes his "prehistory," and his recollected stories seem touched by the bizarre influence of Gunter Grass. On the day in 1938 when Austria capitulates to Hitler, for example...