Word: humoristic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries. Humorist De Vries continues to deal with absurdity, but in this bitter novel of a man's progress from religious to secular faith, absurdity is of the existential kind: life is a joke, and a bad one at that...
...happy sea of absurdity. In Comfort Me with Apples and The Tunnel of Love, adultery was the only way to hold a marriage together; there was power in futility, wisdom in platitudes and, of course, virtue in vice. But always there have been signs that inside the humorist, a serious novelist was struggling to get out. Now, in The Blood of the Lamb, absurdity becomes tragic, and De Vries says what has been on his lips all along: life is a joke, and a bad one at that...
...business to overthrow one institution or another; if he's only in the business to poke irreverent but gentle fun, to amuse without biting, to comment without caring then, in my terms, he may be a lampoonist or a parodist or a light humorist, but he's not a satirist. A humorist will hold up a mirror, look at its reflection chuckle warmly and say "Well it's silly but its not such a bad reflection after all"; a satirist will have a darker view. That's why the night satirists were mislabelled as sick comedians. They weren't sick...
...Humorist Herb Shriner, whose Larchmont, N.Y., home shelters a 14-rank Wurlitzer salvaged from the old Chicago Arena. Shriner is better known as a harmonica player (he recently played as soloist with the Cleveland Symphony) than as an organist. Says he: "All my life I wanted a mouth organ big enough to set down to, and now I've got it. My wife calls it a mechanical mother...
...Millmoss, unhurt (even the Thurber fencer who loses his head is not hurt) but ill at ease, not at all sure he likes being where events have swept him. In his eloquent preface to My Life and Hard Times, Thurber complained of feeling much the same; the humorist, he wrote, "knows vaguely that the nation is not much good any more; he has read that the crust of the earth is shrinking alarmingly and that the universe is growing steadily colder, but he does not believe that any of the three is in half as bad shape...