Word: humor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cactus Flower. Humor is often the puckish shadow cast by national character. English comedy is a running display of oneupmanship, reflecting an indelible class system. The Teutonic cast-ironies of Brecht seem manufactured by Krupp. The classic American comic event is the chase, a drolly tangible version of the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream. And the French sex farce is logic run rampant, reason carried to an unreasonable and absurd extremity. That is why French sex farces are innately sexless: Descartes wrote them all. They begin with cogito ergo sum, and they rely not on seduction but sophistry...
...pursuit is undertaken with relish and good humor, much as a Claes Oldenburg delights in making a mattress-sized Popsicle on a limp stick. Beauty seems no longer at stake; the word itself is rarely used. But tough, satirical commentary abounds. "An artist should be an evangelist for looking," says Rauschenberg. Yet in creating a second, magical reality, the artist often ends up with whole stage-sets, creating a future problem: What's to keep the museums of the future from looking like a decayed Disneyland, or the whole back...
...Sardonic Humor. At first, Woodward wanted to be a participant sportsman, not a spectator. But a series of operations for cataracts cost him his peripheral vision and closed athletics to him as a career. After graduating from Amherst, he went to work for local newspapers; in 1930 he moved to the New York Herald Tribune as sportswriter...
Then as now, most sportswriters took themselves so seriously that they wrote about a baserunner stealing home as earnestly as if they were covering the theft of the Mono. Lisa. Woodward kept his subject in perspective, cutting everyone down to size with his sardonic sense of humor. When Dan Ferris retired as executive secretary of the Amateur Athletic Union in 1962, Woodward expressed unabashed pleasure. "As a tour conductor of American athletes abroad, Ferris ranked with Mike Quill's newest subway guard...
There was no deliberate humor in the battle for such stars as Texas Linebacker Tommy Nobis, who was drafted No. 1 by both the A.F.L.'s Houston Oilers and the N.F.L.'s Atlanta Falcons. "That boy's got a 20½-in. neck," sighed Oiler Owner K. S. ("Bud") Adams as he flew off to a conference with Nobis at the Villa Capri Motor Hotel in Austin last week. Nobis also, it developed, had an attorney. While Tommy drank half a dozen Cokes, gulped down two club sandwiches and said nothing, Adams tried to find out what...