Word: comic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...spent a term at University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, taking a cram course in Welsh to cool nationalist resentment in his titular fief. Even so, a large part of Charles' education at Cambridge was extracurricular. His happiest hours at Trinity were apparently spent performing in a series of comic revues, in which Charles showed a talent for daffy comedy and self-deprecating good humor...
...goes another episode of Les Frustrés, a cartoon strip created by a Frenchwoman named Claire Bretécher and appearing in the leftist French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. For four years now, Les Frustrés has been comic-stripping the hypocrisy from everyday life among the thinking classes. In the process, Bretécher has become a financially secure woman, a cult figure among the trendy Parisians she skewers, and probably the most important French cartoonist never to be heard...
Readers who try to decipher her fullpage, many-framed scratchings may think she has a point there. Bretécher's comic strips, not exactly thigh-slappers, suggest the wry, nervous humor of Jules Feiffer and Garry Trudeau. Her typically flabby, potato-nosed men, women and children often discourse eloquently on feminism, Freudianism, environmentalism, Marxism or some other millstone of doctrine, only to betray their soaring words with some bourgeois inconsistency. There is, for example, the porn-film producer who denounces his working class audience as "pigs" and says he panders to them only to help finance the kind...
Bretécher has endured that world for 38 years. Raised in Brittany, she reports that she drew her first cartoon at age five and went on to too many years of art school. After teaching drawing in Paris, she began selling freelance cartoons to comic-strip magazines. Among those early Bretéchers were Turnips in the Cosmos, a sci-fi epic, and Cellulite, the saga of a husband-hunting medieval princess. Publisher Claude Perdriel was impressed by some of her more satirical strips, and in 1974 offered her the newly vacant job of regular cartoonist at his Nouvel...
...talk-show circuit. That, ironically, is where Bretécher was last week−the American, not the French−making press appearances in New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco to promote her book. That task must trouble the satirist without an ideology. "Comic strips are a form of con," she confesses. "All you do is play along with something that works, and suddenly people are asking for your opinions on everything. It's all baloney." Could be, but she does slice it with undeniable flair...