Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. JOSEPH HELLER, 76, darkly comic novelist and World War II veteran whose classic Catch-22 detailed the madness of war; in East Hampton, N.Y. The famous catch he created in 1961: "If [a pilot] flew [missions] he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and he had to" (see Eulogy...
...Gilbert and Sullivan need a hit. Princess Ida is just not doing the sort of business they're used to. But Sullivan (Corduner) wants to write something more serious than comic operettas. And Gilbert (Broadbent) keeps trying to recycle stale story lines that his collaborator (and the critics) dismiss...
...works turns out to be one of the year's more beguiling surprises. It is not at all the sort of thing one expects from Leigh, the very sober creator of films like Naked and Secrets and Lies, for it is basically the story--somewhat comic, somewhat desperate, very carefully detailed--of rehearsing and putting on the operetta...
...WAITING by Ha Jin. A doctor in the Chinese army wants to divorce his wife, who lives back in his native village, and marry a nurse. Years and years pass, and the doctor gets no closer to his heart's desire. The author's gently comic rendering of this ordeal won him, deservedly, a 1999 National Book Award...
...antics of the orphans, most of whom are newcomers to the business, provides perfect comic relief to the sterile walls of the institution. Especially endearing are Curly, whose desperate attempts to be adopted results in his telling everyone who visited that he was "the best, really," and Fuzzy, whose illness forces him to live in a breathing dome...