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...Wahington-based humorist thinks the comic value of his work rises and falls to some extent with the material he's satirizing. "If the people are up on something and they're interested in it, then the humor of it works. If they're not interested, then the humor doesn't work," Buchwald explained. "It's like Johnny Carson--he'll tell a joke, and if the people don't know what he's talking about, it just lies there flat. And then he'll mention something about Billy Carter or something and he'll get applause. So when...

Author: By Burton F. Jablin, | Title: Art Buchwald: Portrait of a Sometimes Unfunny Man | 10/2/1980 | See Source »

DIED. Sam Levenson, 68, humorist and matzo-barrel philosopher, whose monologues and bestselling books celebrated the folklore of New York Jewry and gently spoofed the absurdities of modern family life; of a heart attack; in Brooklyn. A teacher of high school Spanish for eleven years, Levenson amused his pupils by recounting tales of his poor but happy childhood and strict but loving parents. ("Our menu at mealtime offered two choices-take it or leave it.") After he turned his classroom routines into a nightclub act, the portly, bow-tied comedian was an instant hit on television and host...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Milestones, Sep. 8, 1980 | 9/8/1980 | See Source »

...resembled a dapper cross between Groucho Marx and Rudyard Kipling; the same dark, emphatic brows, bristle-broom mustache, prognathic jaw and mordant cast of eye behind steel-rimmed glasses. But when he described himself, there was no mistaking the original style of the most literate, widely traveled humorist of his time: "Button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin and pauper-poor is S.J. Perelman, whose tall, stooping figure is better known to the twilit half-world of five continents than to Publishers' Row. That he possesses the power to become invisible to finance companies; that his laboratory is tooled...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: S.J. Perelman | 10/29/1979 | See Source »

...Post-Impressionist Daddy; Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Enough; Insert Flap "A" and Throw Away; No Starch in the Dhoti, S'll Vous Plait; Methinks He Doth Protein Too Much. His death last week in New York at 75 closed the page on a generation of American humorists that included Frank Sullivan, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and H. Allen Smith. Yet as Humorist Russell Baker observes, Perelman's work was not typically American: "His writing had a certain English fineness in it. There is a love of language and an extensive vocabulary. He is hard to type...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: S.J. Perelman | 10/29/1979 | See Source »

Unlike Lives of a Cell, here Thomas writes what he feels like writing, disallowing any overall structure for the book. But taken one at a time, Medusa reveals Thomas as a gifted humorist, moralist, psychiatrist and critic. Thomas has no poses, no axes to grind, and so he remains humane, candid and optimistic...

Author: By Michael Stein, | Title: Sluggish | 10/19/1979 | See Source »

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