Word: comical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...child, his parents indulged his fascination with the exotic by reading him stories of the Arabian Nights. A few years later he was poring over foreign comic books...
...Abner, the hero of Al Capp's comic strip, worked as a mattress tester, sleeping away his hours on the job. This soft life is not for Helen and Robert Yurs of Sycamore, Ill., who operate Rayco Engineering, probably the only consulting service that makes house calls to test bedding for structural defects...
That she does, later, as a lady of pleasure, madam and finally founder of an international chain of Schools of Love. But Ellen's experiences are no more colorful than her manner of reporting them. Burgess turns his heroine's "Uneducated English" into a marvelously supple and comic tool of exposition. When she recalls the job that finally did her father in, a pianoplaying marathon in Blackpool, Ellen tries to give some sense of Billy's repertoire during his last 15 days at the keyboard; several pages of song titles follow, including Beethoven's Mignonette in G, the Pilgrim...
Best of all, she makes her disreputable old father seem oddly heroic and their life together, despite the troubles, a comic romp. To read The Pianoplayers is to understand Ellen's observation, gleaned from watching those music-hall routines at Blackpool, on the infectious quality of laughter: "Once an audience starts they'll go on all night...
...much of a choice," complains the now deceased founder of Buckeye Basin on his head-stone. Such is the comic dilemma of the town pariah, Cassie (Rosanna Arquette). After stabbing the village stud with a fork for loving and leaving her, Cassie is none too popular in her hometown. Having bungled suicide attempt after attempt, she resigns herself to a boring job and a life in limbo...