Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...actor appeal, the magnitude of the technicolor spectacle, number of hoof-beats per square actor. "California" fails miserably on the first two counts and barely comes within minimum standards on the last. Where the hero generally carries the plot on his godlike shoulders and livens the dialogue with sardonic humor, a miscast Ray Milland almost appears to be a slightly paunchy heel...
This type, whom demagogues affect to love, Joyce really loved and loathed, grieved for, impersonated and laughed himself sick over. With Freudian penetration and unFreudian humor, he understood Bloom's mind as a river of non-sequiturs and fantasies of fear, guilt and desire-a gigantic living ragbag, intermittently aware of his fellows, and at the same time tiny, lonely and abandoned in a vast, fearsome universe...
NATIVE AMERICAN HUMOR (396 pp.)-Edited by James R. Aswell-Harper...
Made in U.S.A. Like barbed wire and bifocal eyeglasses, this brand of humor is a U.S. invention. It is as pure an expression of Yankee or backwoods genius as the coonskin cap and the basswood spittoon. The latest to work it over is Tennessee-born James R. Aswell, who has dug out about 100 items (including the above, by Tennessee's George W. Harris about 1845) from old books, newspapers and magazines...
...vigorous doctoring of texts (i.e., cutting, rearranging, shearing off excess dialect) Editor Aswell has adapted them for what he calls "modern reading." His conception of humor is broad enough to embrace Irving, Poe and Edward Everett, but he also includes the best of the true-blue local colorists, nateral-born liars and ringtailed roarers. Among them...