Word: humor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...recent Broadway disaster was the musical Kelly, which opened and closed last January and cost its backers over $650,000. Most Broadway producers now search for "first-class" musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof and Luv, which blend small doses of serious concern with large amounts of enjoyable humor and song...
Cheerful Sadism. The comics were a long time working up to Peanuts' special style and humor. Conscientious historians like to trace the strips back to Egyptian papyrus, Grecian ceramics, medieval tapestries, or Hogarth's illustrations of 18th century London lowlife; but as a matter of practical fact, the modern comics were not born until the New York newspaper circulation wars of the 1890s, in which crude but funny comics were valued for their hold on readers...
...public had wearied of yellow journalism, and the comics calmed down. There was less jaw breaking, more jawing, though the humor was still basic. Mutt, originally a horseplayer, was soon joined by Jeff, and the pair still quietly swindle each other today. Abie the Agent, an ethnic comic character, often cracked jokes in Yiddish and was not above haranguing a waiter: "It ain't the principle either; it's the ten cents." In Bringing Up Father, Irish-born Jiggs plans desperate stratagems to escape his starched collar and shrewish wife for the solid comforts of Dinty Moore...
During all the years of solemnity, one strip provided an antidote of sophisticated wit, and all the modern humor strips are in its debt. George Herriman's Krazy Kat, which ran from 1910 until its creator's death in 1944, rarely strayed from the established routine: Krazy, a thwarted idealist like Charlie Brown, loves the mouse Ignatz, but Ignatz is so incensed at this unnatural love from a cat that he hurls a brick at her; whereupon he is carted off to jail by the guardian of law and order, Offissa Pupp. Herriman injected so much poetry into...
...keeps all of them interesting for at least two of the three hours spent In Harm's Way. At one moment he shrewdly plays the grimness of war against the undeniable glamour of it, next diverts the flow of sentimental clichés into a vein of snappish humor. "I'd enjoy meeting your son," says Meredith. "Naw-you wouldn't," grumbles Wayne, eying the lad across a messroom with eloquent distaste. Other scenes crackle comfortably: O'Neal cravenly having his backbone slapped into shape in the men's washup; Andrews placidly playing croquet...