Word: deadpan
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...inherently funny about two people being romantically thwarted for nearly two decades, Waiting turns, page by careful page, into a deliciously comic novel. Ha Jin, who left his native China in 1985 to study at Brandeis University and then remained in the U.S., tells this tale in an impeccably deadpan manner. He casts a wise, rather than a cold, eye on his characters' struggles, both with an inflexible social system and their own weaknesses. With two earlier collections of stories and a novella, Ha Jin attracted notice as a guide to a world few outside China know. His first novel...
...written on intermittent frames, Buster Keaton, film pioneer and comedy legend, relied instead on visual complexity and sophistication: carefully wrought facial reactions, exquisitely timed double takes, graceful slapstick and outrageous acrobatics. He was a master of both subtlety and extravagance--he was called "Old Stoneface" for his constant deadpan which could somehowwhere the facade of a house falls over on him but doesn't touch him as he goes through a window-- that's just one example). Seven Chances is bestknown for the sequence in which his flight from the swarm of brides brings him down a rocky hillside...
...traveler, who never merits a name, really must get going, but the tasks keep piling up. Before long, he's rebuilding a jetty, doing homework for the owner's daughter, playing on the local pub's dart team and running the town's milk route. In this creepy, deadpan novel by a nominee for Britain's Booker Prize, nothing much happens--except that one man slowly, painlessly, surrenders his life...
Gorey's taste for deadpan absurdity is sharpened by what he has called his "unreasonable interest in surrealism and Dada." He is a great fan of surrealist Max Ernst, and, just as Ernst rearranged 19th-century engravings into his own fantastic collages, Gorey recombines the elements of forgotten Victorian novels, reshuffling the set pieces and stock characters after his fancy. One of my favorites, The Object-Lesson, is constructed along these lines, piling delicious non sequitur on delicious non sequitur, like this: "It was already Thursday, but his lordship's artificial limb could not be found; therefore, having directed...
...their jobs. When he's not indulging his you-can't-handle-the-truth side, Sorkin spins witty, hypercaffeinated office jabber with an intensity that's easier to buy from folks who have the Bomb than from sportscasters. That and an ensemble including ice-cool Rob Lowe and the deadpan, woebegone Richard Schiff make this freshman White House worth cutting slack for--for now. This is, after all, no cream-puff game like politics. It's TV, where honeymoons are even shorter...