Word: comically
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first-rate comic art, the funnier the surfaces the sadder the depths. Nowhere is that clearer than in the novels and short stories of Stanley Elkin, whose improvisations on the American way and the English language make him our foremost literary jazz band. His most exuberant characters-a department store owner, a bail bondsman, an itinerant radio announcer-combine the energy and appetites of the Middle West with the legendary qualities of Sholom Aleichem's villagers. Elkin makes much joyful noise unto the Lord, but there is also banter to deflect the wrath, and complaining because it might...
...psychology at the University of Illinois, conducted a ten-year investigation, ending in 1970, on 875 third-grade children in a semirural part of New York State. Eron started with the conviction that the impact of television on people was no greater than that of movies, fairy tales or comic strips. He now believes that a "direct, positive relation" exists between TV viewing by small boys and aggressive behavior. Little girls, significantly, did not show any increase in such aggressive behavior. But a new project Eron has since begun indicates that they do now. His explanation: today TV has more...
...with an invitation to milk and cookies, a promise made good at show's end, when the entire audience is conveyed by bus to a snack with the star. But it is in Tony Clifton, with his crass, abusive desperation, that Kaufman may have found his strongest comic voice. A distant cousin to Lenny Bruce's abrasive small-timer bombing at the London Palladium, Tony is the dark side of every comic. He is also, to Andy Kaufman, very real. Tony Clifton has a separate agent, gets separate billing, demands-and receives-separate dressing-room facilities when...
...offer substitutes that can compensate for that defect-an off-the-wall characterization here, an unexpected plot twist there, a memorable line of dialogue somewhere else. This is a disappointment: Demme's last film, Handle With Care, abounded in all these qualities, even though it was complexly comic social commentary rather than a simple suspense story...
Some plays are the comic books of the theater. All of their characters are caricatures. Their situations have the labeled banality of canned clichés. The dialogue is Cro-Magnon English. In scene after scene the ludicrous and the dreadful intersect at some flash point where the playgoer's ribs collapse in implausible laughter...