Word: deft
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...full-time writer from the age of 22, Johnson turned out 27 novels, the last, A Bonfire, to be published in the U.S. next month. Though her books did not sell as well as those written by Snow, her second husband, critics praised them for satirical wit and deft malice...
Beneath the deft mimicry is the cultural critic's remove from his subject and his audience. This is not new. All humor is a detached analysis, an autopsy of the society's dreams and demons. As the sit-down iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche put it, "A joke is an epitaph on an emotion." The post-funny comics go a step further by taking the ironist's step back. By making fun of the obsequiousness and desperation found in the lower circles of show-business purgatory, they are chiseling epitaphs on epitaphs. They haunt cemeteries of frayed hopes...
...Weather Underground, Brooks is a more accessible, ultimately more subversive radical professor of post-funny comedy. Says Brooks, who was born Albert Einstein, son of the dialect comedian Parkyakarkus: "Life is so bizarre anyway, the slightest twist can make it really funny." Brooks' twist is so slight, so deft, that many may not get the joke. In 1975 he and Harry Shearer wrote and produced A Star Is Bought, a record album ostensibly designed to "sell" Albert Brooks to various radio audiences. There was a patriotic monologue for country stations, a novelty record for the Top-40 market...
DIED. Edward (Eddie) Sauter, 66, trumpet-playing jazz composer and arranger who during the 1930s and 1940s contributed deft, harmonically venturesome scores to many top swing bands, notably that of Benny Goodman (Clarinet á la King, Benny Rides Again), then teamed up with fellow Arranger Bill Finegan during the 1950s to form the innovative Sauter-Finegan orchestra, which used unusually diverse instrumentation to recast such tunes as Moonlight on the Ganges, April in Paris and The Doodletown Fifers; of a heart attack; in Nyack...
...young schoolteacher (John Rubinstein) comes to Kulyenchikov. Smitten by Reed, he is swept into a kind of "Romeo and Wooliet" romance and lifts the village curse through true love. Rubinstein is an ardent and vastly sympathetic performer, but neither he nor the deft comic ministrations of Director Mike Nichols can salvage this show. For whatever it may mean, Simon's two weakest efforts in 19 plays have a Russian connection, The Good Doctor, a kind of Chekhovian doodle, and now Fools. When next tempted in that direction, he should probably say nyet. -By T.E. Kalem