Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...with good reason that volunteers are impatient with official over-years of the Peace Corps, a comic dialogue developed between volunteers and staff that went something like this...
Kaplan too owns the stage. In everything I have seen him do before this show he has played the Flatbush gonif, the king of the muzuzahed one-liners. In Flea he acts. Eyes, face, tummy--everything is part of the comic arsenal. Kaplan's timing and moves are astonishing. He never walks but rather changes from shuffle to trudge to leap to glide. And like the true master of high comedy he never bruises a line or gesture by offering it up before the audience is ready...
...fact, a head count shows that six previous survivors of the Powell epic are killed off in this novel. In Powell's war, only the rotters flourish-notably Kenneth Widmerpool, whose humorless egomania and bounderish one-upmanship have won him critical status as one of the great comic creations of modern English fiction. He is now on the make as a staff major, a virtuoso of bumf, and he chews poor Jenkins' ear in a war of total paper...
Others, like Jackie Kennedy, who bought a set of psychedelic-colored plastic boxes, do so just because the shape and shade of the things appeal to them. And still others-maybe the majority-buy conversation pieces that they can add to their collection of comic books and Humphrey Bogart posters, reducing the whole march toward mind expansion to a close-order drill on the old campground...
These and other things have not helped its readers in the 28 years since James Joyce's labyrinthine masterpiece was published. Its comic genius is buried in a mountainous midden of language that is neither English nor Irish. Nor, for that matter, is it any other European tongue. It is all of them at once-"Eurish," a maze of European tongues, polylingual puns, multiple meanings, parodies, philosophy, public events and private jokes, and a multitude of characters, real and imaginary, in a span of time from Genesis to Judgment...