Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...imagine what happens when Allen slips on one of those banana peels. It is almost impossible, however, to convey the intricacy of his comic inventiveness, the shrewdness with which he sustains his comic lines. The simplest measure of Sleeper's success is perhaps the fact that one recalls it not by quoting Allen's one-liners but by trying to describe-inadequately-his beautifully built visual gags...
...Detective Agency-"No job too tough, no mystery too baffling." Superman was brought on with the sound of the bullet he could outspeed and of the locomotive he could overpower. Terry and the Pirates, Buck Rogers and Little Orphan Annie were liberated from the frozen postures of the comic strip. Captain Midnight; Tom Mix; Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, among others, became the aural equivalents of the dime novel and the magazine serial...
Delivery and timing are, of course, essential to the comic value of such a situation. Julie Harris and Charles Durning possess both to perfection. They fence together like Olympic champions. Harris gives the performance of a star's star, while Durning acts with a subtlety, daring and solidity that he has not achieved before, even in That Championship Season. Whatever qualms some drama critics have expressed about Joseph Papp's play choices, his first season at the helm of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater has brought a superior caliber of acting such as was never seen or even...
...company of other stars, though, that gives comfort to many of the show-business names who gather at the synagogue. No one is singled out by pesky fund raisers, autograph hunters or gawkers, a devotional hazard at other Los Angeles area synagogues. When he belonged to another temple, Comic Jack Carter recalls, "People kept staring and whispering, 'Isn't that Joey Bishop?' Now I'm with my own peers, and I dig the fellowship...
...brief compass the author manages to bring off a remarkable range of scenes and situations, from academic Cambridge to the black underbelly of Roxbury (where Ken teaches awhile) to an orgy involving the apple pickers, a family Civil War sword and a death by drowning. Under the black comic claptrap in Black Conceit is a deeply felt, uncompromising book about an idealist's disappointment that human nature does not prove perfectible, that human decency, liberally applied, cannot suspend the law of the jungle. "We go on making choices, after the original helplessness," Coffin reflects, "and ultimately it becomes...