Word: humorously
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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America's only adult humor magazine is now a comedy empire...
Eight years ago, three newly graduated Harvard Lampoon editors had a wild and crazy idea: Why not start the first modern national humor magazine for American adults? They took the idea to a middle-aged entrepreneur-the publisher of Weight Watchers magazine, no less-and National Lampoon was born. The rest is history, or if not history, then at least hilarity...
...class. We are the insiders who have chosen to stand in the doorway and criticize the organization. Our comic pose is superior. It says, 'I'm better than you and I'm going to destroy you.' It's an offensive, very aggressive form of humor...
...fortunate, too, that the Loeb cast is so accomplished, because Wycherly's jokes have a tendency to fall flat on a 20th century audience. Almost nobody in the audience got the humor in the repeated references (i.e. Horner's name) to horns, cuckolds and the like, which is not so much a comment on their ignorance as an example of the changes in humor over 300 years. Cuckold jokes were a scream in 1675, but they are an anachronism now. Moreover, words don't mean the same things now as they did then. When Sparkish calls Horner "the sign...
...sympathetic to Allen's problem. As great comedian to his age, he must have felt that the faintest suggestion of humor would have stirred audiences to a risibility from which he could not recover their attention. But, of course, the absence of wit does not necessarily betoken seriousness; it merely betokens the absence of wit. All Allen really had to avoid was farce. We could have accepted, as a logical outgrowth of his work to date, the rue and irony of a full-scale comedy of middle-class manners, a sympathetically satirical study of the lies by which many...