Word: humor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Heller, the change to basic black was not made basically for laughs. "I am not using humor as a goal, but as a means to a goal," he says. "The ultimate effect is not frivolity but bitter pessimism." As Critic Leslie Fiedler sees it: "Black humor fits anyone worth reading today. It's the only valid contemporary work." Nonetheless, the strongest critics of blackness are found among humorists, many of whom believe that humor that does not make people laugh is not humor at all. Some of the critics, however, confuse black humor with sick humor, whose chief practitioner...
...many in an age of constant change, the best place to find subjects for humor is in the news, and contemporary humor reflects a growing dependence on current events. The best humorous columnists-Art Buchwald and Russell Baker-naturally look to the news for their subjects, but so do more and more comics. "People are a lot more hip about humor today," says Bob Hope. "People like their comedians to be current. We have to do the things they're reading about. De Gaulle, for example. One man against the world-he's jealous of the American...
...been in on the information explosion since the beginning finds the gentle, sophisticated comedies of the '30s and '40s relics to be viewed on the museum of the Late Show. Their memories are less of Benchley than of Berkeley, and, in the absence of much protest humor, they have concentrated on deliberate absurdities that refuse to deal with the adult world. Such were the elephant jokes (What do you get when you cross an elephant with a jar of peanut butter? A peanut that never forgets or an elephant that sticks to the roof of your mouth...
...general joking seem to indicate one of the richest times for comedy in American history. But do they? A closer examination of current comedy reveals neither a renaissance nor a reformation but the beginnings of what could, unless it is reversed, become the dark ages of American humor...
...quality of TV comedy leaves something to be desired, the quantity of written humor is pitifully small; most writers with a comic talent have been lured by the wide exposure and high pay of TV. No replacements have been found for such essayists as Benchley, Ring Lardner, Don Marquis. Frank Sullivan. There is no longer a Thurber, expressing in word and picture the uneasiness of modern life and the war between the sexes. "Funny men don't seem to write books these days," laments Russell Baker. Nightclub humor-what there is of it-is also in bad shape...