Word: comical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ADAPTATION-NEXT are two one-acters directed by Elaine May with a crisp and zany comic flair. Adaptation, written by Miss May, is the game of life staged like a TV contest with the contestants hopping from one huge checkerboard square to another. Gabriel Dell, in a performance that is laugh-and letter-perfect, is the hero who plays the adaptation game from birth to death. Terrence McNally's Next features James Coco, fortyish, fat and balding, as a potential draftee called up for his physical examination. Coco gives an enormously funny and resourceful performance in McNally...
Pigeon kickers may find its meanness of spirit a trifle overdone, but readers who have long cherished a shy yearning to beat up crippled newsboys will be delighted with Keith Waterhouse's new comic novel. It is possible, of course, to write gaily about any abomination-Brendan Behan turned out two successful stage comedies about men who were to be executed in the morning, neither with a happy ending-but it is hard to recall anything quite like Waterhouse's merry laughter at his main character's torment...
Edward Stewart's characters are so folded, spindled and mutilated that the mind's computer tends to reject them as not altogether human. Yet they have a way of engaging the reader with their perverse antics and comic, but horrific, deeds. Stewart's first novel, Orpheus on Top, marked him as a humorist of darkest hue. In this, his second, he has created an "entertainment" worthy of France's Grand Guignol theater...
...sings a which they concede "Every time they're near me/ I just can't get enough." The number, which makes the most of its racial joke, is preceded by "Black Boys" (in which white girls sing "They are so damned yummy/ They satisfy my tummy")--and the convoluted comic juxtapositions are wild...
Portnoy's Complaint is cast in the form of a series of psychoanalytic sessions between the 33-year-old Alexander Portnoy and his psychiatrist. It is more a series of comic monologues than anything else; I think the best analogy is that of a raucous cantata. The book opens with a parody of a psychiatric dictionary: Portnoy's Complaint--after its pronunciation and origin is established--is defined as "a disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistisc impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often a perverse nature." For further information, we are told to consult an article...