Word: humorically
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...came out first as a short novel in Harper's during the past summer. The novelette was subtly satirical and financially fantistic. People said of it, as they say of anything of Morley's which they do not clearly understand. "What delightful fantasy?" Furthermore when the Morley sense of humor stopped operating efficiently, the characters instead of being wise enough to cease trying to be funny, kept right on. So the bright spots, which are not infrequent were dragged down by spots not so bright, which, alas were also not infrequent. And as was the novelette, so also for once...
...laymen wondered if the legendary difference between the English sense of humor and the American might not have colored Psychologist Aveling's conclusions. Is all laughter "ugly . . . hard . . . selfish?" Is a father "ugly" when he manifests delight at the cunning or courage of his small son ? Is it "selfish" of children to chortle and bubble when the magician yanks the rabbit from the hat? Are those people "hard" who sometimes burst out laughing even when they are all alone, for no reason that they could tell you except that "it seems so good just to be alive...
...verse, scraps of conversation, encounters real and imaginary, idle and erotic, gay and sad; strings of words, chains of sentences, nets of associated ideas as tangled yet meaningful as the twisted ganglia of the human brain and body. Because Poet Aiken has a vivid sense of words, a mocking humor and much delicacy, these undercurrents are pleasantly fantastic, without the visceral insistence of Poet Joyce's spillings...
Lena carries no lipstick. Lena has not read much. But she is healthy and capable. She has the humor and hardihood of people to whom pleasure and pain are natural phenomena, not nervous problems. The young man is going to be a doctor, not a banker or poet, so after his junior year at Princeton he asks Lena Wilson and she accepts...
...Rain is Elmer Gantry described by a neighbor whose generosity and politeness, guarded by a sense of humor, have not been assassinated by anger or malice. No bit of raucous mimicry by Sinclair Lewis surpasses Dillwyn Parrish's subtly corrosive pictures of fleshy Fred Rain painting his bathroom while trying not to marry; fouling his straight young son's mind with a circumlocution on sex in flowers; preparing stuffy sermons in his smug study. Not "Old Jud" himself, the muscular college revivalist of Elmer Gantry, is more offensive than Fay Johnson, the Y.M.C.A. hearty of this book...