Word: guffaws
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...round bend, hurling Honor to the floor beating her. On another level, A Severed Head is a comedy of - but they are all bad manners: mixed with Pinteresque pauses, attenuated satire of psychoanalysis with gross sight gags - like Martin's groping for the phone when is only the (guffaw) doorbell...
...fluty call of a curlew heralds the first light of dawn. A faraway widgeon whistles to its companions. A rid off in the dark shallows, a flock of shelduck guffaw at one another like wee-hour carousers wending their way home. MacKenzie Thorpe is in his natural habitat. He is guiding three "guns" across the desolate marshlands of Lincolnshire on England's east coast. Bowlegged and bearded, he creeps through the high grass like some hungry predator, his burly hulk seemingly impervious to the chill wind knifing off the North Sea. Climbing a creek bank, one of the hunters...
...TROUBLE with Shaw is his lack of subtlety. He never learned to settle for a chuckle instead of a guffaw, to suggest an idea instead of pounding it into the viewer's head, to be inspirational rather than pedantic. You can try to ignore the propaganda in plays like St. Joan or Major Barbara, which have something of a plot line, and at some points in them you can even ignore the bad jokes. The three plays which opened this week at the Loeb Drama Center, on the other hand, go a long way toward showing how bad a really...
...your well-insulated intellectualism. Admittedly, it is escapist; but that does not exclude the possibility of its being funny. When Fred Grandy comes on and looks like Bob Dylan and eats his harmonica like Dylan and sings like you've always secretly thought Bob Dylan did sing, you can guffaw if you want; you can even roll around a little on the kindergarten-colored wood benches (at least I did, much to the discomfort of another reviewer's wife who was snickering beside...
...enough to present the issues of today with tongue-in-cheek or heart-in-throat and expect the audience to react automatically. But this is primarily what the Light Company does. We see slides of Agnew and we are supposed to guffaw; we see slides of Vietnam bloodshed and we are supposed to shudder. We've seen this all before many times, and by now we have hardened to it. The theatre will have to sneak up from behind and twist our funny bones or club us on our heads to get the laugh or the cringe...