Word: humoristic
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...view of British and German Junkerdom." In the hysteria of conflict this dual indictment earns Shaw the enmity of his countrymen. Friends cut him dead; libraries remove his books from their shelves. Still his letters refuse to compromise, and their integrity discloses a man of abiding principle, a humorist who, perhaps for the only time, refuses to regard life as an inverted comedy...
...Humorist Art Buchwald saw it, White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan had given supporters of New York Governor Mario Cuomo reason to rejoice. How? By lambasting Cuomo as a "glib, fast-talking lobbyist for a reactionary liberalism" in his campaign against President Reagan's tax-reform plan. And by branding the Democrats' star performer a "welfare statist" who belongs to an "American Left" whose "dirty little secret is that it is interested in power, not people." Such choice abuse, in Buchwald's view, added up to the "kind of endorsement from the White House" that "a Democratic candidate...
Image is an obsession. "There's no such thing as a fat yuppie," says Gene Street, principal owner of SRO, a fashionable Dallas restaurant and bar that features full-length mirrors in the men's lounge. "It's all part of a wave of self-love," says Author-Humorist Fran Lebowitz. "They've overweighted the sanctity of the human body. These bodies aren't temples. They're barely bodegas." Says Screenwriter Greenfeld: "It's fear of embarrassment. In Hollywood you can stuff coke up your nose until it falls off. But God forbid you should appear drunk in public...
There is a larger point to make here though and it's this: as Trillin feared, the absurdity of reality is catching up on him. In the introduction to Uncivil Liberties, Trillin explains that the challenge to an American humorist is to "concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses ... in other words ... when Ronald Reagan appointed as Deputy Secretary of State a man who could not name the Prime Minister of South Africa, some Sunday newspaper satirist somewhere in America was groaning at having his joke...
...might think that a guy who hadn't published a novel in eleven years would show a few signs of nervousness, make a false move here and there, when he gave it another try. But Bruce Jay Friedman, who was almost certainly, pound for pound, the peppiest black humorist of the whole 1960s (Remember Stern ? A Mother's Kisses ?), hasn't exactly been idle during his long layoff. He wrote The Lonely Guy's Book of Life, which not only advised single fellas how to cope but became a motion picture vehicle for Steve Martin. He did the screenplay...