Word: humor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SHOP ON MAIN STREET. Humor and fantasy heighten the impact of this keen-edged Czech tragedy. In a complacent Slovakian village in 1942, a henpecked nobody (Josef Króner) befriends but ultimately betrays the doomed old Jewess (Ida Kamiñska) whose button shop is given to him by the Nazis...
...absurdists have heeded the admonition of their existential idol Kierkegaard, who wrote: "The comic spirit is not wild or vehement, its laughter is not shrill." Black humor has a long tradition that reached its apex in Jonathan Swift. But the humorists who dwell on death and disaster today lean too often toward the narcissistic, reflecting images of themselves as helpless heroes in a world they can neither take nor leave. Their less lugubrious colleagues, on the other hand, have been all too willing to cede the comic to the journalists and to allow the commercial to override the classic...
...self-satire: Lyndon Johnson showing his scar, Premier Ky and his wife in their Captain and Mrs. Midnight flight suits, the Ecumenical Council debating whether the Jews really killed Christ. There is surprisingly little political satire of Lyndon Johnson. The reason, believes Playwright-Director George Abbott, is that "humor is exaggeration, and President Johnson is his own exaggeration." Kennedy, in short, had a silk hat that could be knocked off by a humorist's snowball; Johnson's Stetson looks funnier on him than knocked...
Such is the state of U.S. humor that, except for the comparatively small squadron of black humorists, there are almost no original comic talents left. As it is now, the choice seems to lie between the banalities of the TV screen and what are the frequent absurdities of the black humorists, a choice roughly comparable to that offered by a menu with only two items: vanilla pudding and a whisky sour...
...passage of time has faded Finian's Rainbow. Its fantasy minces, its humor stumbles, its message plods. Its plot--which genially ignores internal consistency throughout--soon divests itself of every shred of plausibility and rushes headlong into a happy ending...