Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DANCE OF GENGHIS COHN, by Romain Gary. The classic Jewish gambit-finding macabre humor in extreme tribulation-is used with uncommon originality in this allegorical novel of genocide and national guilt...
There is also some wild black humor, notably one episode that is a bitter comment on the outside world's long gullibility about Soviet Russia. Two prisoners invent a fantasy about a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt to Moscow's Butyrki Prison, just after the war. Inmates are washed in "Lilac Fairy" soap, offered wigs to cover their shaved heads. Their cells are temporarily transformed into elegant salons with foreign magazines on their coffee tables. When Mrs. Roosevelt picks out at random a man and asks what he is being punished for, the prison governor replies that he was a Gestapo...
There he continued to write. One Day went through four drafts, becoming leaner and simpler in each. The agony of One Day comes from the spectacle of a simple man, laboring and suffering with naive good humor, and all for nothing. For Russian readers this agony is redoubled. Russians have always loved innocents in literature, and the carpenter Ivan is a peasant innocent in direct descent from Tolstoy's Platon Karataev in War and Peace. His meekness is in jarring contrast to the degradation of the camp?where an extra bowl of mush makes a day "almost happy," and where...
...visual humor provided by director Burt Shevelove brings nothing to nothing. Characters dump water on each other's heads and slam rifle butts on their toes. One endless bit revolves around a prostitute stumbling around with an arrow stuck between her tits. It's that kind of show...
...like the idea of funny fiction," says Wilfrid Sheed. "When I started writing, my first impulse was toward humor, but I soon learned that I wanted to use it for serious purposes." Sheed's first models were the "flat but musical" styles of such Americans as James Thurber and Sherwood Anderson; later, he added the English writers Cyril Connolly and E. M. Forster. Now he describes his fictional ideal as "Flaubert and James with the language of Wodehouse and Perelman...