Word: humorlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perry treats flakes like Leary and the short-lived belief that one could get high off banana peels with the same sense of irony he brings to his accounts of the radical philosophy of the Diggers, the messianic communalists who sought an end to the money economy. That the humorless Diggers grew out of the still extant San Francisco Mime Troupe, a drama group performing children's puppet shows as well as social commentary sketches, exemplifies the un-predictable directions in which the Haight movement would lead. Less so, though, than the realization that the abomination now calling itself...
This past summer, though, has seen the dawn of utterly humorless, downright wimpy police approaches to enforcing the speed limit...
Perhaps the humorless simplicity of the movie lies in the fact that it was rated PG. The makers of the movie tried to cater to the child audience and the older crowd, but they sacrificed basic, good B-moviemaking in the process. Rustler's Rhapsody tries to sell itself so hard that it sells itself short. The wild west madcap parody is a building block which just cannot support such a deadweight movie. Without more, Rustler's Rhapsody becomes about as funny as a herd of cattle in Spurr, Texas...
Such insights may be intended ironically; if so, Gordon gives no clues. For all the novel's virtues and craftsmanship, Men and Angels is remarkably humorless. Being a feminist, and having to reinvent the world, is evidently hard and serious work. And one of the occupational hazards, which Gordon skirts but cannot quite avoid, is sacrificing art on the pulpit of ideology...
...useful on such occasions to pick up John Reed's enthusiastic description of Lenin in Ten Days That Shook the World: "Loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been . . . a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies--but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms." Then, having read that, to pick up Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography, Speak, Memory, in which the author, having fled the Soviet revolution, discusses the "bestial terror that had been sanctioned by Lenin --the torture- house, the blood-bespattered wall." Reed saw what...