Word: humorist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Fresca, Pepsi, Coffee, Tea.'' When told that he is heading for the wrong aircraft, the President roars, ''Son, they're all my helicopters.'' At the end, ''Q'' Clearance dangles an intriguing question: Where did a onetime spinner of sea-horse operas learn to write comedy? Perhaps from his grandfather, Humorist Robert Benchley, or from his father, Novelist Nathaniel, or even from the exasperating Johnson (Lyndon, not Samuel), for whom young Peter once worked as a White House speechwriter. In any case, this Benchley's latest effort contains some memorable slapstick. When Burnham splits his pants...
...asked Roy Blount Jr., a literary humorist in the Twain tradition, to put the author in perspective. In his essay, Roy plumbs Twain's deeply contrarian nature and his abiding sadness and even bitterness at what he saw as collective human folly. For Twain's influence on race relations, we asked novelist and scholar Stephen L. Carter to address Twain's views on slavery and African Americans. There have been few books more controversial in U.S. history than Huck Finn, but Carter concludes that the novel is profoundly antislavery and that Twain pioneered the sophisticated literary attack on racism...
Travel writing was lucrative, but novels were what serious literary men were expected to produce, and from the start Twain longed to be taken seriously, to be regarded as more than "merely" a humorist. So by 1873 he had rolled out his first novel, The Gilded Age, which he co-wrote with a Connecticut journalist, Charles Dudley Warner. With that book's title, Twain gave the post--Civil War era, a time of boundless greed and opportunism, the name it still has and that it shares, in some quarters, with the era we seem to be willy-nilly emerging from...
...recent pursuits. “For friends and family—it’s a hobby of mine, they don’t pay me to make them.”The sudden rash of adhesive-based accoutrements doesn’t constitute a new direction for the humorist and author so much as a means of putting off his next book. Rakoff and fellow humorist Sarah Vowell—both contributors to Chicago Public Radio’s “This American Life”—will be reading selections of their work tonight...
...fight he thought he could win in Florida, trying to win a national election on local battlefields of his own choosing. He listened to political operatives who valued big-state delegates more than small-state momentum, and now it looks like he's going to get neither. The humorist Dave Barry suggested that Rudy might be trying to copy the strategy of the Miami Dolphins by losing so many primaries, but at least the Fins won one game this year. "I don't want to hate on his strategy, but I don't think you can blow off all those...