Word: humor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE is John Osborne's Inferno, the journey of an "irredeemably mediocre" middle-aged soul through a modern hell, all the while lashing out at his fate with visceral scorn and waspish humor. Nicol Williamson makes him a good sight larger than most heroes...
...HUMOR can be dissected, as a frog can," E. B. White once warned, "but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind...
Until recently, many American humorists obeyed that caveat by looking the other way when the subject was raised, or treating the whole thing as a joke. Robert Benchley spoke for most of his colleagues when he lampooned the scientific students of humor with his dictum: "We must understand that all sentences which begin with W are funny." Well, something unfunny has happened to American humor. Today the humorists are outexamining the examiners, some of them even making second careers as commentators who probe and pontificate on the radio and TV panels that ceaselessly sift American manners, morals and mores...
...Faun, and Till Eulenspiegel, all preceding the Brahms, only further confirmed the painful facelessness of his style. Behind his strange podium histrionics and overliterate interpretations lies a dominant inability (or worse, an unwillingness) to truly communicate with his musicians. Amid this pedestrianism, most of Till's grotesque humor was lost, along with the overt charm of the Debussy Prelude. Season after season of such readings serve only to dull the sensibilities of entire audiences...
...start cringing at their own shadows. In adapting his novel to the screen, Scenarist Gavin Lambert softens the tone of merry irreverence and moves the action back to the comfortably distant 1930s. And Director Robert Mulligan never quite decides whether to play for heartbreaks or black humor. The strain tells on Robert Redford, a deft actor, miscast as Daisy's neurotic, one-night-stand husband who establishes his virility beyond reasonable doubt before being written off unconvincingly as a homosexual...