Word: comical
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Ferris' first book, Then We Came to the End, published in 2007, was a knockout - a comic novel set in an office and told in the first person plural by a watercooler Greek chorus. That device was either a lucky stunt or a carefully calibrated masterstroke. Either way, a sophomore slump wouldn't have been surprising. Even Zadie Smith had The Autograph Man. But Ferris - who's a year older than Smith and approximately as good-looking - has gone the other...
...Unnamed isn't a grim novel, exactly, but it's grim-ish. Only rarely does Ferris show the nice touch with a comic digression that he gave free rein to in Then We Came to the End. (Though there is a one-off about a man named Lev with a sexual fetish involving exotic snakes, which I choose to accept as an hommage ŕ moi.) It's as if Ferris is testing his range to make sure the bass end is there as well as the comic treble. It's present and accounted for and suitably rich and profound...
...more serious note, at Notre Dame, The Observer printed a cartoon on Jan. 13 that many considered offensive to the LGBT community. The comic strip has since been discontinued, and Observer Assistant Managing Editor Kara King, who said she takes responsibility for allowing it to run, resigned Jan. 17 in a letter to the Notre Dame community...
Walsh does, however, find himself at the center of a truly remarkable rendition of the play’s Pyramus and Thisbe scene. Shakespeare’s purposely atrocious play-within-the-play reaches almost sublime levels of comic absurdity, and is the only scene that truly succeeds. John Kuntz—who plays a caricatured version of Peter Quince to perfection—begins the scene by acting out the play with action figures. His madcap energy fully sustains this feat until the other actors take over with even more delightfully embarrassing antics. Walsh’s Pyramus performs...
Somber voice-overs try to explain why each woman didn't notice her pregnancy, often to comic effect: "She urinated normally." Sometimes the woman doesn't realize she's pregnant because she's obese or has irregular periods. Sometimes it's because she has been told it's impossible for her to get pregnant or because she thinks she's on fail-safe birth control. (See TIME's Wellness blog...