Word: comical
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...rich land and their social organization gave them leisure, because art never became the exclusive possession of intellectuals, because the remoteness of Bali protected it from foreign influence. He found on the walls of North Bali temples, cheek by jowl with bas-reliefs of gods and monsters, some comic-strip carvings showing a fat Dutchman drinking beer, a man cranking a car, a highway robbery modeled after a scene in a cinema...
...Author. The serious, sociological tone of Leo Calvin Rosten's study belies his creation of the comic character, Hyman Kaplan, in the New Yorker, where he uses the pseudonym Leonard Q. Ross. Polish-born, short, dark-eyed and heavy-lidded, Mr. Rosten at two was taken to Chicago where he soon began to fight poverty with animated ingenuity. A University of Chicago scholarship started his education and he earned Phi Beta Kappa honors. After a year of browsing in Europe, unable to find the newspaper job he wanted when he returned to Chicago, Author Rosten lectured in the Midwest...
...Deal gave him his big chance in 1933. Then he made the Eagle a free circulation Democratic daily. In a few months he hit on the big McCraken idea: into his morning tabloid he inserted-for paid subscribers only-a four-page section of local editorial comment, fiction, comics. His'best stunt was to run a serial or comic in the free sheet, then switch it to the paid insert. Thus he gradually converted free readers into paying subscribers...
From this beginning, Director McCarey accelerates the comic pace, shows Lucy trying lamely but gamely to follow her new-found Oklahoma hearty (Ralph Bellamy) through the intricacies of "truckin'," singing prairie ballads in duo with him, listening to his tender homespun verse, with Jerry an amused and disturbing audience. As Lucy's life becomes more madly muddled, with three men complicating it, the comedy turns slapstick. High spots are Jerry's discomfiting brush with jujitsu at the expert hands of the singing teacher's Japanese houseboy, the free-for-all that follows Mr. Smith...
...though to add comic relief, this picaresque collection of individuals is rounded off with the Union Party candidate, Carleton Brett, and the hero of Little Italy, Signor Santosuosso. Although they may well be better suited for office than some of their opponents, the chance of their receiving more than 10,000 votes between them is slight...