Word: guffaw
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...affair with the town. The general feeling we have is of people evolving toward the light." But after 102 episodes, there has been little perceptible evolution. Last week's three chapters, for instance, interwove the multiple subplots without even a glimmer of psychic peace or a fleeting, joyous guffaw. Dr. Vincent Markham, back home after winning "international renown as the Albert Schweitzer of the Andes," was, it turned out, on the brink of divorce because he could not relate to women, and on the road to suicide because of sibling rivalry with a twin brother. The town...
...night after night in his own yard watching his own wife undress, and must then justify this irrational behavior to the police? And when another misadventure exposes him to public humiliation, what is the proper reaction to Stanley's response, which is a hangover lasting twelve years? A guffaw...
...humankind. His passions are scoriae, his imagination a holocaust. His wit is an indentured imp that leaps to any bidding-it can tickle the funny bone, attack with acid, fry living flesh on a deadpan, reach down the throat of a corpse and come up with a ghastly guffaw. His language is bare, strong, lucid, manly: perhaps the most intensely concentrated prose ever written in English. In energy he is the last Elizabethan; not even Shakespeare's Lear surpasses the vigor of Swift's invective or the reach of his rage. In conscience he is the first Victorian...
Cambridge Circus. A good guffaw nowadays is hard to find. Onstage and on film comedy has gone cosmic-as if dramatists were engaged in a campaign to laugh wars, capital punishment and lung cancer out of existence. The big news about Cambridge Circus is that it thinks small and carries a big slapstick. The manic, unassuming young graduates of Cambridge University who wrote and perform in the revue would rather tickle a rib than wash a brain, and more often than not they are indescribably funny...
...voyage of selfdiscovery. Spouting psychoanalytical jargon, needling one another and everybody else, the Volkswagen men bumble through Brooklyn, pulling at a bottle of whisky, stopping at intermittent bars, where they are worsted by all the local Cyclops and Circes. Finally, they barge into the funeral parlor, snort, giggle and guffaw over the rabbi's sermon-obviously they knew Leslie so much better than the rabbi ever did. They file past the bier, peer in -whoops, the cadaver is not Leslie. Wrong funeral parlor...