Word: humor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...editor, Alexis Viereck, is also forthright; witness this line of his short poems: "That I might fornicate with you." The line is actually more comic than shocking; his poetry of cruelty is really the poetry of humor in disguise. Viereck's other poems are more traditionally successful, and his imagery is more subtly sensual, although he consistently approaches cliche...
...HOMECOMING is the season's most tantalizing drama, by Harold Pinter, who prods and arouses with the twin-tined fork of shock and humor. Vivien Merchant leads the Royal Shakespeare Company through a moody production in which even the pauses are eloquent...
DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN, by Louis Ferdinand Céline. The founding father of black humor in a new, splendidly gutty translation of his classic about the bitter, unbreakable orphan whose childhood and nonage were a lugubrious epic of squalor, filth, misery and hatred...
...Clown on bassoon: He is a practical joker. It figures, say fellow musicians, because anybody who takes up such a contrary and ridiculous instrument must have a sense of humor. Ever since Mendelssohn made the bassoon a buffoon in a clown march, the bassoonist has been trying to prove that the instrument is a gentleman or at least a pagliaccio, a clown with a soul. But nobody believes...
...power and the humor in all of Pinter's plays come from the presentation of this isolation and fear. The audience is free to conjecture relations homosexual or relations heterosexual, to pick out a symbol here or observe some principle of psychology. But the characters, Pinter tells us, live as do figures in our world: within themselves, fearing the open door through which can pass the undefined menace, never laughing. How can they laugh? Listening only to themselves, they always miss the punch line, or don't realize when they've spoken...