Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is the year's inescapable movie. Nothing anyone says about it is going to quell the curiosity of the multitudes regarding this, the biggest comeback of them all. Nor should it. The special effects are marvelous, the good-humored script is comic-bookish without being excessively campy, and there are two excellent performances. One is by Charles Grodin as the leader of the expedition that starts out looking for oil and ends up with this large, furry problem on its hands. Grodin plays the honcho as a hard-bailer of the sort that used to hang around...
...consolation and Gardner's new form of hyphen: a novel-within-a-novel. Set in boldface type, this parody-saga of marijuana smugglers-the stuff for which lurid covers on airport paperbacks are designed-runs to almost 150 pages and comes dangerously close to upstaging October Light. Among comic-strip characters in Sally's paperback are the smuggling boat skipper Captain Fist, who gets violently seasick even in San Francisco Bay; Jonathan Nit, an inventor who schemes to solve the energy shortage by hooking up electric eels; Wong Chop, a Chinatown connection; and, inevitably, a girl named Jane...
...something labeled beurre d'arachide crémeux. But when you figure out that it means $3.75 for a jar of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, it's ridiculous." Ketcham also feared that he was on the verge of turning Dennis' all-American comic-strip household into chez Mitchell. Says he: "I may be leaving in time, just before I inadvertently put a bottle of wine on the Mitchell table and have Dennis' father come home for lunch on a bicycle with a stick of bread under...
...together some sort of theory as to why people laugh. This is a question that has puzzled minds of the caliber of Socrates' and Freud's, and Novelist George Meredith's and Philosopher Henri Bergson's, let alone your stand-up comic...
...rural, urban, regional and national characteristics. But the rare comedian, impelled by motives that lie too deep for analysis, makes the audience itself the butt of his humor, attacks head-on the smugness, vanity and hypocrisy that people prefer to hide or ignore. Placed in the direct line of comic fire, an audience, and by extension a society, can turn vicious. One need only evoke the fate of Lenny Bruce as one case in evidence...