Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tomatoes/Potatoes. In her house the walls, telephones and pianos are always white, the butler is always comic, and her escort perennially in top hat and tails, ready for a twirl. Love is the only problem she knows, and that is a somewhat half-witted affair, its contretemps based on misunderstandings that a TV-trained three-year-old could settle in seconds. The battle of the sexes is either mock or bittersweet; one lyric says it all: "We should be like a couple of hot tomatoes/But you're as cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes." All this is sexy...
Richard Lindner's art comes on with the blaring oompah of a brass band. His subject is people-notably women. They are overripe nymphets whose hearts belong to Dada. Emblazoned in garish circus colors, more powerful than comic-book Supermen, his colossal caricatures loom like contemporary Baals...
...hiking. He has told her to visit him in Prague, and she is taking him at his word. His parents greet her disconnectedly. Their son is working a dance; they are watching TV. The mother is obsessed by a suitcase our heroine has brought, and this occasions some highly comic dialogue. Finally Mila gets home, and the mother insists that he sleep in the parental bed. Vaudeville erupts; the gruff teddy-bear of a father snorts "He smells like a brewery!" We are in stitches when Forman cuts to the blonde, crouched at the keyhole, convulsed like us, shaking...
Joan Baez thinks so. In fact, she's so sure Al Capp's cartoon character is a take-off on her that she has demanded an apology and the immediate execution of the comic strip abomination. "Either out of ignorance or malice," she wailed, "he has made being for peace equal to being for Communism, the Viet Cong and narcotics." Just as captiously, the cartoonist growled that Joanie wasn't Joan. "She should remember that protest singers don't own protest. When she protests about others' rights to protest, she is killing the whole racket...
...only cumbrous thing about this novel is the title, borrowed from some lines by W. H. Auden. Otherwise, Balloons Are Available is lighter than air and easily dirigible toward its comic purpose. The hero, who progresses from repairman to executive vice president, is named Howard Ormsby. Part Candide, part Buster Keaton, he is loosed in a land where every pratfall is followed by a commercial. Author Crittenden's best effects are gained through a sort of contrapuntal dialogue. One of Howard's loves tells him the story of her life, including the part about her older brother...