Word: humorousness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...center of the contemporary stage remains the European drama represented by Beckett, lonesco, Genet, Pinter and Osborne. None are alike; yet all raise a hemlock toast to the 20th century. Theirs is a drama of metaphysical anguish, rigorous negation, asocial stance, skin-prickling guilt and anxiety, and abidingly absurd humor. In their plays, the situation of man is horrible and funny at the same time. Ionesco says that man laughs so as not to cry. The problem these playwrights pose is man's oldest and newest-the existence problem...
Someone called, of course, and the rest is Off-Broadway history. William Alfred clearly enjoys, if somewhat uneasily, his new role, but he looks at the whole affair with the same irony and good-natured humor that mark his opinions on nearly everything else. It is easy to see why the press has taken to Alfred for he is, as his Irish ancestors would say, a "grand guy." His good taste is always tinged with a humorous saltiness that seems to deal pretension a wallop. He is a native Brooklynite who doesn't hesitate to use the word...
...brass buttons and a gold F on the breast pocket. Neat, but not too gaudy. Even in the office, as he feeds IBM cards into the computer, the Fidelity man is certainly a credit to de corps. No longer is there suppressed boyhood envy of the white-suited Good Humor man, no longer jealousy of bankers' grey. A fig for Braniff stewardesses in Pucci bloomers. Even those Avis chaps with their blazers and TRY buttons shrink to insignificance when one no longer has to go to work one day in a blue suit, another day in brown. No more...
...written about $1,500,000 worth of policies for farmers and small-town businessmen. The man who conceived the idea had reason to believe that it would succeed. Robert E. Dye, 51, a John Hancock vice president, worked his way through the University of California as a Good Humor man, shifted the chocolate-coated sell from ice cream to insurance...
...nasty language can be had for free on any street corner. A moviegoer who lays out his money to see Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in a blue comedy will get a shock of another color. Virginia Woolf at its best is a baleful, brutally funny explosion of black humor...