Word: humority
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...subject of Keillor's new book, Lake Wobegon Days (Viking; $17.95), a pack of beguiling lies that has been on the New York Times best-seller list for ten weeks and, with some 700,000 copies in print, is the publishing sleeper of the year. Keillor has written memorable humor pieces that have nothing to do with rural Minnesota, including a lovely, raunchy story that ran in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, about the troubles of the first woman major-league baseball player. (Twenty-seven of his magazine pieces were collected in 1982's Happy to Be Here...
There is a bitter quality to some of his recollections of Lake Wobegon, only partly softened by humor. In his book he claims that an angry son returned to the town intending to nail 95 complaints about his repressive parents to the door of the Lutheran church. The 34th of these accusations is that the parents made it impossible for him to accept a compliment. It is Keillor talking, no question. Someone says, "Good speech," and he mumbles, "Oh, it was way too long. I didn't know what I was talking about. I was just blathering." Actually, he confesses...
...century ago and even today seems almost shocking in its arrant sensuality. "The tango expresses something deep in our personalities," says Héctor Orezzoli, who conceived the revue along with his friend Claudio Segovia. "The dance is tortuous, complicated, intricate, mysterious, rough, but also sophisticated and full of humor and irony...
...mystery fiction: the discovery of a long-buried skeleton and the consequent unraveling of a skein of past concealment and deceit. The setting is a mediocre British college, recently converted from all girls to coeducation, and the fierce possessiveness of the female Old Guard gives the story depth and humor...
...gasoline, people burn very well." Auschwitz Survivor Rudolf Vrba manages a smile of roguish irony as he recalls the Germans' insistence that Jewish corpse carriers must always be "running . . . They are a sporty nation, you see." Itzhak Zuckermann, a member of the Jewish wartime resistance, has resources not of humor but of despair. "If you could lick my heart," he tells Lanzmann, "it would poison...