Word: comically
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Back at Gordonstoun in November, he had a long-awaited chance to play a comic acting role: he starred as the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance. Otherwise the year passed quietly. Without sitting for college entrance examinations, Charles was allowed to enter Trinity College, Cambridge, in October...
...presents hilarity on the one side and melancholia on the other. The confusion has been blamed squarely on the Catholic Church, but a country usually gets the religion that suits it. The Irish attitude to sex goes back a long way. Vivian Mercier, in his indispensable book The Irish Comic Tradition, talks of ubiquitous stone carvings depicting a creature called the Sheela-na-gig, half-whore and half-crone, with enormous sexual parts and withered breasts. This would be the same enchantress of ancient legend who, having seduced her victim, turns successively into scalding water, a beast that eats...
...seems to be an agreeable juvenile confection. The plot is almost conventionally simple and contemporary. A 23-year-old graduate student named Chris marries a 21-year-old coed-dropout named Ellen, with whom he has slept on and off for three years. The tone inclines rakishly toward the comic. Ellen is pregnant, and the marriage has to be a bit of a scramble. There is a mad, drunken bus ride on the part of the groom. In a scene of smothered hilarity, the couple receive spiritual instructions (and an introductory sex manual) from a young minister with a crew...
...shadows keep falling across the story. Those grandparents of Ellen who purse their lips in disapproval but lend their Michigan lodge for the honeymoon are less comic old folks than vaguely sinister agents provocateurs. Nor is the northwestern shore of Lake Michigan the Garden of Eden it appears to the two children, pretending like every young couple to be the only, the original man and woman on earth. After lyrically celebrating the pleasures of lovemaking, Woiwode begins softly terrorizing paradise. Ghostly presences appear progressively more foreboding: the stuffed animals on the wall, the mice in the piano, night tappings...
...years ago. in his first novel, Evan S. Connell created a brilliant portrait of one inhabitant of this psychic heartland, Mrs. India Bridge, mother of three, wife of a successful Kansas City lawyer. Written as a sequence of linked vignettes, Mrs. Bridge showed a remorseless accuracy and a comic sense powerful enough to reduce its subject to her feckless gist. (In the final scene, she has managed to get stuck inside her own garage. She is last seen tapping on the car window with the ignition key as she calls, to no one, "Hello? Hello out there...