Word: comical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...there for his own kicks, not to strike up a rapport with the audience. "I'm not somebody who smiles and bows," he says. "You know, I'm up there to play. It's strictly business with me." Yet many patrons expect something different from the former stand-up comic. "Most of them are shocked that he doesn't speak or tell jokes," says banjoist Eddie Davis. "But after a few tunes, they get caught up in the music...
...BELLAROSA CONNECTION by Saul Bellow (Penguin; $6.95). The Nobel laureate's second appearance of the year in a paperback original, this absorbing novella once again retails the dislocations -- wrenching, comic or both -- of being Jewish in America...
Downstairs, on the funny line, is Cliff's other brother-in-law Lester, a sleek TV producer (played by Alan Alda in a gloriously fashioned comic performance). He offers Cliff a sinecure: filming a documentary that will make Lester look like a philosopher-king among the pompous nitwits who produce prime-time TV. Cliff agrees, but because he tries to turn Lester's story into a truthful expose, the project collapses. Along the way he loses the woman he loves (Mia Farrow), as well as a serious film to which he had been profoundly committed...
...taut and stirring as A Theft was, The Bellarosa Connection is even better. Bellow here stands squarely on the ground that he conquered long ago: the dislocations -- wrenching, comic or both -- of being Jewish in America. Bellow's narrator, a man in his early 70s, never reveals his own name, but he engagingly -- and a bit smugly -- displays the trappings of his success: "I force myself to remember that I was not born in a Philadelphia house with 20- foot ceilings but began life as the child of Russian Jews from New Jersey." He had earned his mansion, plus...
...massacre itself is tragic; the subsequent cover-up is tragi-comic. Despite almost incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the USSR has consistently maintained that the Germans were responsible for the massacre. The Soviets, at least until recently, served up duplicity and intimidation when faced with questions about Katyn...