Word: humoristic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reader has any business being amused, or even feeling comfortable, in the company of Peter De Vries. At one irrepressible level, the man masquerades as a humorist, perfectly capable of reeling out one outlandishly felicitous conceit after another. The conceits abound in this book. "Get divorced while you're young," says one character to another. This is not funny. It is in the same key as that timeless anecdote of the Indian victim, trussed and scalped, who is asked bv his saviors if he is in any pain. "Only when I laugh," he says...
...Matter of Heart. Starting his campaign for the September primary, Screvane moved into Manhattan's heavily Jewish garment district, accompanied by Humorist Harry Hershfield. O.K., cried Hershfield, so maybe Screvane is of Italian-Irish descent and married to Limerick-born Bridie McKessy-but "he has a Jewish heart." Although by no means assured of his own party's nomination, Screvane went on the offensive against Republican Nominee John Lindsay, attacking him as a "socialite, silk-stocking Congressman" and as "the boss-backed candidate of the Republicans, who masquerades as an independent...
...would found a dormitory; then after that, or more probably with it, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books." Thus, in the '20s, did Humorist Stephen Leacock define a university, and it may be a blessing that he is not alive to see how bustle has replaced his leisurely academe in Canadian higher education...
...article he once wrote on the art of loafing, Humorist Nathaniel Benchley (Robert's son) recommended: "Do nothing, but appear busy." His latest novel heeds that advice. Assorted human beings and ghosts scurry frantically about a haunted house in New England. One ghostly incident is followed by another-a flying tumbler, a fleeting shadow, a disembodied goose. Assuming that it is a whale of a joke to have a ghost sink an old curmudgeon's opulent yacht docked outside the house, Benchley lets the ghost sink a second one. The ghosts, to be sure, have more life than...
...novelists who have proved to be the really fecund and effective black humorists. They are pursuing aims that are very different from the painful psychological insights of John Updike or the detached precision of John O'Hara. But they are not avant-garde experimentalists: however startling their viewpoint, they move their subjects along in supple, readable style. Critic Leslie Fiedler proclaims flatly: " 'Black humorist' fits anyone worth reading today. It's the only valid contemporary work. You can't fight or cry or shout or pound the table. The only response to the world that...