Word: humoristic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Quoth the sunburned satirist: "I look like a peeling billboard." Thus out of the bush near Nairobi, Kenya, strewing perels of witdom to mark his trail, came a hornrimmed, slyly befuddled big white hunter known to civilized nations as Humorist S. J. Perelman, 59. Having bagged a Broadway comedy hit. The Beauty Part, Perelman was an author in search of "four magazine articles." At the end of his Land-Roving safari through Kenya, he caromed up to London, hoping later to join a tiger shoot in India, then on to Burma and Bangkok to see what the jet-set drifters...
...listen to a Beethoven symphony without trying to identify with the composer. But in the age of do-it-yourself culture, everyman is his own self-discovered, self-expressing genius, though the self being expressed is frequently about as artistic as a defective drain. This is the play Humorist S. J. Perelman apparently began to write, and there are hints of it still ("Every housewife in the country has a novel under her apron"). Followed through, this might have led him to a bitingly comic examination of a serious question: Are democracy and culture ultimately compatible...
Underwood's figures give a first impression of having been created by a slightly dotty humorist. They cavort and prance, leap and fly, as if under the spell of a pleasantly chaotic orchestra. At times the rhythms become so frenetic that the small figures look as if they might shake themselves apart. Yet the surface humor quickly peels away to reveal more serious intentions underneath. Underwood's sculptures are expressions of ideas, some of which he transforms into dances of joy and some into gestures of despair...
Letters from the Earth, by Mark Twain. These savage, scatologically irreligious papers, long suppressed by Twain's daughter, were a product of the deep melancholy of the humorist...
Blood-Drenched Lies. Twain takes a humorist's advantage of the Bible: he makes the worst possible case for it by interpreting it as literally as possible. The crux of his complaint is his inability to reconcile a good God with all the suffering he saw in the world-an age-old problem that has bothered greater minds and produced greater musings. In the guise of Satan, Twain writes his letters to the Archangels Michael and Gabriel explaining the bizarre beliefs of mortals on a variety of topics: ON GOD: "It is most difficult to understand the disposition...