Word: comic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hospital is modern and well managed, as close to a first-class resort as a poor person is ever likely to encounter. The other patients-comic in some instances, tragic in others-are all helpful in drawing her out of her anxious reserve. A decent, quiet-spoken young mechanic (Daniel Quenaud), who bought her a comforting cup of coffee when they met at the clinic back home, now offers her the possibility of a gentle romance unlike anything she has ever known...
...whole devoid of serious flaws. The varying poses that the characters assume are perhaps too stereotypical, too facile a launching pad for tired television pilot jokes. The beginning of the show is especially weak; the humor is artificially imposed, and the emotional resonances that later reinforce the play's comic surfaces are mission...
...English literature's "performing flea," an acidulous comment that P.G. himself ("Plum" to friends) loved to repeat. But other writers, ranging from Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell to Bertrand Russell and Evelyn Waugh, recognized that Wodehouse was a good bit more. Waugh, an indisputable master of the comic novel, would reread his favorites from the Wodehouse canon every year, as some people go back for spiritual sustenance to Shakespeare or the Bible. "For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man, no 'aboriginal calamity,' " Waugh wrote. "His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They...
Ironically, Strindberg takes a traditionally comic situation--a mother and daughter in love with the same man--and uses it, to extract the themes that pervade all four chamber plays: the world is as cruelly fraudulent as the mother in the play, guilt is implicit in life, and death--"the final settling of accounts"--is the one escape route...
Delivery Boy. As a boy, Jackson was a poor athlete, an avid Boy Scout and a skillful debater. At 13, he won a prize from the Everett Herald for diligence as a newspaper delivery boy. Its comic page chronicled the adventures of a newspaper reporter named Scoop, who was the inspiration for Jackson's nickname. His newspaper route included Everett's red-light district, where Jackson was appalled to find prominent men patronizing whorehouses, gambling dens and speakeasies. Indeed, in his commencement speech at his high school graduation in 1930, Jackson primly lectured his audience about the evils...