Word: humoredly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Stop, You're Killing Me is an apt title for a bloodstained package of three one-act plays by James Leo Herlihy, presented by the Theater Company of Boston. The title's aptness lies not only in its suggestion of homicide, but humor-each of the three is laughing on the outside while dying on the inside...
Gory Camp. Humor is no detriment at all to the third and best play of the triad. An epicene author named Kayo Hathaway (William Young), sleek as a snake and wicked as a weasel, has made a million by turning out reams of gory camp about a Commie-hating little old lady in sneakers and her homicidal gorilla of a son. Granting an interview to a worshipful young fan (Matthew Cowles), Hathaway utters the pomposity: "You get what you give." And that becomes the text for a murder that is as amusing as it is satisfying...
What has eight legs and laughs? ran the question in the '30s. Answer: the Marx Brothers. Later they lost a pair of legs, when Zeppo dropped out of the act. Groucho, Chico and Harpo went on to make eight more films together, becoming precursors of the new American humor. Groucho's flip irrelevancies foreshadowed the theater of the absurd: "I'd horsewhip you if I had a horse." Harpo was a troll bridge between the silents and the talkies. "How can you write for Harpo?" shrugged George S. Kaufman. "All you can say is, 'Harpo enters...
...think I could handle more than a gal a day." He retells the best of the anecdotes from the days when the boys were as funny off-screen as on. Best of all, the book resists the temptation to analyze, observing E. B. White's dictum: "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process...
...process, the author shows himself as a dealer in the comedy of the spirit far different from Graham Greene's celebrated psychodramas of doubt, doom and-damnation. His scenes are as funny as J. F. Powers', but without their cozy in-joke comicality. Keneally's humor is white, not black-a blessed relief. His book is infused with a pawky clerical awareness that human life, though sometimes capable of holiness, is more often merely funny. Thus perceptively armed, he has succeeded in translating the historic fissure in the present church into human terms. Whatever may be said...