Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...give the cool kids a yuk or two. Well, losers grow up and when they start making their first twenty or thirty thousand, people stop laughing at them. Unless, of course they can capitalize on their embarrassment and go professional. Since Charlie Chaplin turned the loser into a comic classic, some of the most successful comedians hit the bigtime on verbal slapstick. You laugh at Rodney Dangerfield (if you do) because he "don't get no respect." And you chuckle at Woody Allen because he's a Jewish...
These two one-acters are hilariously extended anecdotes in the U.S. tradition of the tall story. Making his playwriting debut at Manhattan's American Place Theater, Reynolds, 33, does not shape his plays with sufficient skill, but he does give them a wickedly comic mo mentum like an accomplished barstool raconteur...
What a gag like this lacks in novelty Director Blake Edwards can make up for with the trim velocity of his timing, the precision engineering of each comic contretemps. Then there is Peter Sellers as Clouseau. This idiot-savant gumshoe is one of Sellers' best creations, a creature of impervious stupidity and unyielding, if ever tenuous, dignity. Clouseau can vacuum up the entire contents of a hotel room, drive trucks into a swimming pool, inundate his quarters with bubble bath, and still react with the mere suggestion of embarrassment, as if he had just sneezed a little too loudly...
Pride of the Bimbos by John Sayles. 258 pages. Atlantic-Little Brown. $7.95. In this comic first novel, Author John Sayles does not just ask that disbelief be willingly suspended; he wants it lynched. He offers up a woebegone five-man softball team (the "world renowned Barooklyn Bimmmmmboos") scrounging around for the carnival trade in scraggly Southern hamlets. Not only do the Bimbos play their exhibitions in drag, but they boast one of the shortest shortstops in captivity: Midget "Pogo" Burns, a onetime private detective now running from the giant black pimp he once shot up in San Francisco...
Allen has a book out too. Without Feathers (Random House; $7.95) is a series of sketches that show the author as a gentle practitioner of the short-haired shaggy-dog story. Most of them should be read as experiments rather than as polished pieces of comic ingenuity. One essay, for example, "If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists," imagines that Vincent Van Gogh is a dentist obsessed with bridgework and X rays as art for art's sake...