Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...admirable sentiment. But the male-female ratio at the event looked much more equitable than on any Peninsula masthead I've seen. And I don't even need to mention the difference between the men who went up to the mike to support a friend and the wannabe comic representing the patriarchy...
...People all around me were usually falling out of their seats with laughter the other evening, so I guess my sense of humor simply doesn't tune into Jackie Mason's comic wavelength...
John Waters understands. For a quarter-century, the 47-year-old filmmaker has been America's pre-eminent satirist of domestic depravity. He is also an elegant comic essayist, who puckishly wrote in 1985 that killing a celebrity is "the only sure-fire route to overnight front-page fame." And he is a connoisseur of the judicially sensational, attending many a grotesque trial. Waters can sagely note the media's glamorizing and merchandising of felony -- "These days you can commit a crime, and two weeks later it's a TV movie" -- and in the next breath give a rave review...
...that was long ago, before the '60s -- from which all ominous changes can be dated -- rewrote the rules of American gesture. Such previously banal signifiers as handshakes and haircuts, comic books and pop music, became freighted with contentiousness. Soon Steve Martin was introducing politically correct comedy to the smoking debate. "Mind if I smoke?" he imagined someone asking him, then replied, "No. Mind if I fart?" In the '80s, even James Bond felt bad about smoking. Today the habit is excoriated -- antitobacconists depict Joe Camel as a schoolyard drug pusher -- and publicly survives only as a vestige of James Dean...
...McGahern, the question of overarching literary value is more or less a futile, comic exercise, as he said in a recent interview with the Crimson. His definition of good writing is a simple one. "The best guide," Mr. McGahern said, "to what's good writing is what interests us or gives us pleasure. It's not the only guide, but I think it's the least fallible...