Word: humorously
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...over the Alleghany mountains." His father could "whip the best man in old Kaintuck, and I can whip my father." All in all, the colonel was a wow back in the 1830s-the literary prototype of the tall-talking frontiersman, the first introduction to the stage of native Western humor. But what had happened to the play that first made him famous? Until last week, most scholars could point to that as a U.S. literary mystery...
Officials of the University of Colorado recently suspended publication of the Flatiron, college humor magazine, claiming that it "debases student morals through pointless allusions to sex and alcohol." The suspension order termed the magazine "unworthy of being published under the name of the University of Colorado...
...comedies stand up best (The Importance of Being Earnest, A Woman of No Importance). It is still impossible not to smile when Wilde seizes upon some normally dismal aspect of human relations and translates it faithfully and accurately into the language of comedy. It is this most-human humor that is Wilde's greatest gift to English literature. Much as he loved to pretend that he was too detached an artist to have "sympathies," every word he wrote shows that he was much too softhearted (and not really intelligent enough) to possess the large hatreds of a Swift...
...Humor v. Sorrow. The same garnished taste spoils the plays La Sainte Courti-sane and Salome, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and even De Profundis itself. The fairy tales are still charming to read, though they, too, present a problem: peopled with Disney characters who serve only to make bittersweet, intellectual points, they are neither for children (who prefer Grimmer stuff) nor wholly for adults, but perhaps only for people in those in-between years that British Novelist J.R.R. Tolkien (TIME, Nov. 22) so happily calls the "tweens...
...gods who had endowed Wilde so richly with comic gifts refused to allow him the bonus of tragedy. Apart from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde produced nothing in the three years between his release from prison and his death (in 1900, of cerebral meningitis). Humor was his nature, sorrow only his perversity-as he himself may have realized, for it is said that when confronted with a huge bill for a surgical operation toward the end of his life, he sank back into the arms of the Comic Muse, saying: "Ah, well, then, I suppose that I shall have...