Word: comically
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Shumei Okawa, onetime Manchurian railway official, carried comic indifference into broad buffoonery. He-interrupted proceedings by opening his crumpled shirt and rubbing his scrawny chest. Although a U.S. lieutenant colonel was assigned to watch him, Okawa slyly outwitted him, twice darted from his chair to smack startled Tojo's gleaming pate. Let out of court for a sanity test, he babbled in high-pitched English: "I don't like the U.S.; America is democrazy...
...chambers of whose brain, as Hazlitt quoted, "it snows of meat and drink." Whether playing dead or playing the hero, making light of honor or rhapsodizing about sack, impersonating the King or embracing blowzy Doll Tearsheet (amusingly played by Joyce Redman), he rolled through the play, the greatest comic figure in English literature...
When human beings finally came to realize that their masks fooled nobody but themselves, their disillusionment had a new creative result. Naturalistic masks like the Museum's Tibetan Comic Monk (see cut) and Japanese No masks, whose expression could be altered with a nod, were put to use in stage plays...
...Killer, a Story of Syphilis (American Social Hygiene Association; $1). The author (and illustrator) was Dr. Harry A. Wilmer, a young scientist who took five degrees in eight years at the University of Minnesota. His book is a slightly bawdy blend of fact & fancy that seeks by cartoons and comic-strip dialogue to tell about the syphilis spirochete and how it works...
...hillbilly ballad The Martins and the Coys is a burlesque of backwoods feuding which will delight lovers of radio rurality and of Paul Webb's mountaineer cartoons, and offend those who think such caricature as insulting as the hush-mah-mouf kind of comic contempt for Negroes. All the Cats Join In is a jukebox setting of Benny Goodman's record, in which orgiastic hepcats and bobby-soxers, mad on chocolate malteds, tear all over the place, paced and sustained by the sketching of a deft, rapid pencil. It will satisfy the young and the benign, sicken those...