Word: deadpan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Unfortunately, nothing else in The Lottery is as good. The other 24 pieces are brightly lacquered sketches trimmed to New Yorker specifications-deadpan, passionless portraits of cruel children, quietly miserable spinsters, clumsy middle-class drifters, city people lonely in the country. Shirley Jackson accumulates little piles of irrelevant detail, topples them over with the expected sardonic swipe. If she could break out of this mold, she might become one of the U.S.'s best short-story writers...
Dickens had other ways of shocking friends such as Landor. He once sent the poet a deadpan note confiding 1) that he had fallen in love with Queen Victoria ("Don't mention this unhappy attachment," Dickens warned another friend gravely) and 2) that, in order to recover from this sad affair, he intended "to kidnap a [royal] maid of honor and take her to an uninhabited island." It was no wonder that London buzzed with fantastic rumors and no wonder that Dickens found himself furiously denying that he had suddenly "become a Roman Catholic and was raving...
From there on, Webb keeps himself and the audience highly entertained. He wears his freshman cap with the same deadpan elegance he gives to his cane and his well-draped suit. In his job as hasher, he can toss up crepes Belvedere or lecture the young women of the sorority on table manners. At the piano in the sorority parlor, he can play Beethoven or boogie, but he prefers the works of Belvedere. His biggest, and perhaps funniest, moment comes at the Freshman-Sophomore track-meet when he lays aside his dog-eared book, rolls his well-creased trousers above...
Besides being a notable buzzer, Chuck is a deadpan kidder. In spite of his blue eyes and fair skin, he is likely to assert solemnly that he is one-eighth Cherokee Indian. His parents say: "He's liable to tell you anything." Asked about his birthplace, Chuck says: "Ah come from so far up the holler, they had to pipe daylight...
...McInnis has taught his apprentices to think and to field. He has a tremendous store of knowledge behind his sunburned, deadpan face. If he can draw from it to develop one more pitcher to match Godin, he will rank as a class A magician--not to mention coach...