Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Melato), is blessed with all the wit and energy he lacks. With the tough elegance and self-assurance of a top whore in a classy joint, she adds a crucial dimension of sensuality and realism. Salome's bawdy repartees offer Wertmuller just the link she needs to trigger off comic scenes. Her vivid style is distinctly reminiscent of Fellini (with whom she worked on "8 1/2"), especially in portraying the banter and gossip of twenty girls gorging themselves at dinner...
Some of the skits are lamer: a kiddie show where the clown host reads the little ones porn, or a windy send-up of a typical series called "The Dealers," which has to do with the abortively comic exploits of a couple of hard-luck traffickers in grass. But overall the movie maintains high energy. There is one scene of true inspiration. At the end of the 6 o'clock news, the anchor man signs off and sits staring, smile firmly fixed, waiting for the fadeout and credits. Nothing happens. Soon the smile begins to stiffen at the edges...
Thus the case of the Czech comic novelist Milan Kundera comes up at a time when to be persecuted in Czechoslovakia is not a clear advantage. Kundera's work was banned in Czechoslovakia not long after his novel The Joke was published in 1967. It was about a youth who innocently wrote a postcard to his girl friend that teased her about her dedication to Communism. His little joke got him seven years at hard labor. As Philip Roth notes in his introduction to Kundera's short-story collection Laughable Loves, the author also paid. Now 45, Kundera...
Kundera commits some of the funniest literary savaging since Evelyn Waugh polished off Dickens in A Handful of Dust. Running through it is some wonderfully comic sexual burlesque-as, for instance, when Jaromil and his girl are making love, and his mother, hearing her moans (and knowing perfectly well what is happening), comes rushing into the room with a bottle of medicine and a teaspoon...
...meant to see the lifted eye brow and to smile. Then he is meant to see the sober truth of the statement be hind its mockery. Then the mockery be hind that sobriety and so on. What lies deeper, the mockery or the truth? It is a rare comic writer who can raise the question, and Kundera...