Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dialogue is the only source of interest. There is hardly a plot: a sick, lonely, old woman struggles along a road to meet her husband at the railroad station; they start off, then stop to wrangle and reminisce. As for characterization, the minor characters are mediocre comic types, and the old couple merely querulous and sad. Waiting for Godot was even more deficient in plot and character, as these terms are usually understood, but the newer work somehow misses the odd, grim delightfulness that exempted Godot from all the usual demands that are made on a play. All That Fall...
...bowed down"--and then bursts into wild laughter. The manner, on the other hand, is a new one for Mr. Beckett. All That Fall is set, not in the middle of nowhere, but quite recognizably in the Irish countryside. If you allow his characters the rhetorical skill and the comic eccentricities that everybody does allow the Irish, the play is not far from being realistic...
Campton's A Smell of Burning and Memento Mori diverge from realism to comic fantasy. They are short and slight in form, and amiably gruesome in tone. Both are clever jobs, but each is composed of one joke, not a very funny joke at that, spun out far too thinly...
...offbeat nightclubs and twice a week on NBC Radio's Nightline (Tues. and Thurs. 9:10 p.m., E.S.T.), Comic Sahl has been convulsing audiences with his chip-on-shoulder, seemingly ad-libbed yuks. Not everyone has been convulsed. A bitter, nervous type, Sahl talked himself right out of two TV contracts by tactlessly placed sallies, offended network brass by opening one NBC spot with: "Well, kids, if we're good today, General Sarnoff might like us, and if he likes us he'll go to Charles Van Doren and get us more money...
Huxley's Horrors. Each took his time and made a horror comic of it. The characters are British middle and upper class of the great inter-bellum years-but Huxley's are drawn with a Daumier-like fascination and disgust, Waugh's by the lunatic but precise line of a Ronald Searle...