Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Harper, has a following of her own, and Archie Bunker's crew in All in the Family. That is not bad company for a lad who is barely out of his teens, and got his first professional job little more than a year ago as a stand-up comic playing to an off-season crowd in a Puerto Rican resort hotel. Actually, Freddie Prinze is the sort of kinetic, compulsive comic who is and always has been on-whether the locale is a Burbank TV studio or the darkened stoops of Manhattan's West 157th Street, where...
...fear of losing her memory, Zeyer's stroke-induced nominal aphasia. (Nouns escape him and periphrasis ensues, with a passport, for example, becoming "the thing you have to show when you leave a country.") Even Shorty's interior dialogues with his own bowels are put to comic use, along with the fact that old people are often mean and silly, and fall down easily. Amis pursues his doddering prey with tiny twists of plot: through the use of stink bombs, squirt guns and even a heated orange-juice can of urine, Bernard tries to turn the group against...
Perhaps every good young writer should be allowed a book like this one. Still it is a notable disappointment. Three years ago, McHale published two exhilarating novels in quick succession: Principato and Farragan's Retreat. In both he revealed wild comic gusto, a youthful, vengeful rage at certain vagaries of the Roman Catholic Church, and a visceral knowledge of middle-class Irish and Italians around Philadelphia and the Jersey shore. McHale was never a stylist; he made up in energy what he lacked in elegance...
...audience's comic reaction is a measure of both the movie's appeal and its failure as a moral statement. Duddy Kravitz is a thoroughly lovable character. Richard Dreyfuss is superb in his portrayal of the poor mischievous Jewish boy who sets out to make his mark after his hunched-over bearded grandfather tells him, "A man without land is a nobody." Motherless since the age of six, left to fend for himself by his taxi-cab driving father, ignored by his rich uncle, and taunted by his peers, Duddy determines to win the respect of his grandfather...
Taken as an adult comic book, The Best can evade critique. Taken seriously, the tome has its disturbing aspects. Participation in the public arena is increasingly ceded to a few: athletes, politicians, performers. But their audience at least retains the ability to judge for itself, to realize that one man's best may be another's worst. Once the power to discriminate is left to others, that audience becomes herd but not seen, a mass to be manipulated. One would do better to choose the second best because it appeals rather than the best because it is dictated...