Word: humorists
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Classed as a black humorist in the '50s, Barth was hailed as a fabulist in the '60s. He was actually becoming a school of one. Following hints in his own work and examples out of Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, he evolved assumptions that increasingly governed his fiction. Among them: the number of stories to tell is finite and dwindling; print has been rendered passe by film and electronics; realism is an irrational goal for the writer (What is real? Whose reality is it?); art rehashes art. Barth's response was to exalt artifice and make telling...
...Angeles Times was little more than the instrument with which the Chandler family, its sole owners since 1886, scooped out a financial and social empire in Southern California. Real estate deals dictated editorial policy, and news columns seldom threatened the good names and growing fortunes of local business interests. Humorist S.J. Perelman once wrote of a cross-country train trip: "I asked the porter to get me a newspaper and unfortunately the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles Times...
...remarks on the subject. But the reader can see what Muggeridge has excluded by turning his face from the world. Things Past is shot through with melancholy, the lashing-out of a wounded man, a Christian who has forgotten how to play God's fool and a humorist who has misplaced the gift of laughter. - John Skow
DIED. Cornelia Otis Skinner, 78, gifted monologist, actress and humorist; of a stroke; in New York City. Cornelia was weaned on her actor father's renditions of Shakespeare, and made her Broadway debut with him in 1921. Too tall and gawky to play ingenues, she built her stage career slowly, tirelessly touring the U.S. heartlands and Britain in monodramas she wrote and staged herself. Her self-deprecating humor and satirical wit found an outlet in light verse and anecdotal magazine pieces, plays and books, the best known of which was her 1942 travelogue, Our Hearts Were Young...
...Buchwald, humorist, at Georgetown University: "I know many of you are bitter at our generation for using all of the oil reserves. But I would like to remind you of one thing. It was our oil and our gas, and we could do anything we wanted with it. Your generation has to find its own oil and gas reserves...