Word: comical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Central figure in the evening's work was Jerry Kilty, who brought to the role of Falstaff an outstanding comic talent combined with obvious understanding of the multi-faceted role and all its problems. As any Falstaff must, he carried the play on his shoulders: when he was on stage, the production moved out of the limits of Sanders and its audience and into the universal comic meaning of the part. He brought entertainment, and, too, originality and finesse to such speeches as "Banish Jack.." and "Honour...
Love That Kat. Waugh agrees with many a highbrow in thinking that the greatest of all comic strips was the late George Herriman's Krazy Kat, a gentle, loving soul constantly tormented by her great love, Ignatz Mouse, whose joy in life was to "krease his [Kat's] bean" with a brick. Some partisans saw the Kat and Mouse as latter-day versions of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; Poet E. E. Cummings found Krazy's faithfulness a vindication of the principle of love...
...comics had become a maker & breaker of publishing empires. The New York Daily News-Chicago Tribune Syndicate worked out the formula (it was the late Captain Joe Patterson's) of a balanced comic page to lure readers: The Gumps for "gossip, realistic family life; Harold Teen, youth; Smitty, cute-kid stuff; Winnie Winkle, girls; Moon Mullins, burly laughter; Orphan Annie, sentiment . . . Dick Tracy, adventure and the fascination of the morbid and criminal; Terry, adventure of the most up-to-date, sophisticated type; Smilin' Jack, flying and sex; Gasoline Alley . . . life itself...
...Comic strips, says Waugh, abstract bits of American experience and endow them with a sort of idealized timelessness. Dick Tracy always catches the crooks he chases; The Nebbs always quarrel; Blondie and Dagwood always make up. It is part of the American daydream, he thinks, to be as courageous as Steve Canyon, as sexually irresistible as Smilin' Jack, as honest as Joe Palooka. In his harried, uncertain life, the American newspaper reader is greatly sustained by the certainties he finds in the comic strip, the movies-and nowhere else...
Children over 16 may have objections to the sickly yellow cast of the Cinecolor and to the reappearance of that almost extinct species, the shuffling yaassuh-bawss Negro comic...