Word: deadpan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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American humor in its traditional forms -the wisecrack, the tall tale, the deadpan jape, the shaggy-dog story -has both resisted the official puritanism and made it all possible. For more than two centuries, from that subversive puritan Ben Franklin to the wryly theological Charles Schulz, the nation's humorists have operated as a tolerated underground culture. They have conspired to create a fantasy world where good Americans could be as shiftless as Charlie Chaplin's tramp, as cynical as W.C. Fields never-giving-a-sucker-an-even-break, as lecherous as Groucho Marx prowling a bedroom. American...
...Office for South Viet Nam, and it has flown the coop every time the allies have gotten close. Pressed for the latest news on the hunt, an Administration aide wryly told reporters: "We found something that looks like this, but we aren't sure what it is." Then, deadpan, he picked up a writing pad and sketched a large five-sided building that strikingly resembled the Pentagon...
...Theater: Terminal and The Serpent. Death is the deliberative theme of Terminal, but as with Endgame, there was a paradoxical buoyancy to the brief evening (playing time: a little over an hour). In fact, the moments that pretended to morbidity were the moments that failed−most conspicuously, a deadpan lecture on the art of embalming and a rather derivative attempt to dramatize dying, American-style, as an induction center through which the imminent dead get processed like draftees...
Period Paintings. Five years ago, when social conscience was not so uppermost, Director Elliot Silverstein had no compunction about lampooning the deadpan red man in Cat Ballou. In A Man Called Horse, he capitalizes on honesty. Little of this American-made film is in English; the cast is largely composed of true Indians who look as authentic as their names: Richard Fools Bull, Ben Eagleman, Edward Little Sky. The movie portrays the Sioux as a repressive, formally violent people who master their mutual hysteria by refracting it into a hundred narrow superstitions. But their cruelty is no more harsh...