Word: humorousness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...unity of color and form is "Forest, Sun, Birds" is reversed and turned to eery, inexplicable horror in many of the Dada and Proto-Surrealist works, and to humor in others. "Le Jeune Prince" and "The Swan is Very Peaceful," made of pasted photoengravings, combine seemingly incoherent images to acheive inexplicably creepy works, preying on irrational and subconscious resources of the observer...
...Humor. Despite Castro's best efforts, however, the gripes continued wherever Cubans gathered. "There is no room in our ranks for complainers or weaklings, for sowers of panic, for grumblers," warned the Cuban Labor Confederation. Castro's revolutionary committee went even further. It called on all Cubans to "stem lack of seriousness, counter-revolutionary rumors and jokes"-a laughable attempt to curb even humor in Castro's ever more puritanical Cuba...
Galbraith's humor usually registers somewhat below Swiftian satire, as when he writes that the Air Force's contingency plans for Puerto Santos calls for bombing "with maximum emphasis on winning the hearts and minds of the people." Much of the novel bears this slightly self-satisfied straining for effect. As a glimpse of Foggy Bottom, The Triumph has its uses; but its tone begins to grate under the suspicion that the author is enjoying himself more than his performance justifies...
There is also occasional humor: Sellers trying to retrieve his shoe from his host's elaborate system of interior fountains and waterways; Sellers drifting from group to group, making inscrutable attempts at conversation; Sellers listening to a songstress while exhibiting a polite rictus of squirming agony because all the bathrooms are occupied. But most of the evening is just about as trite and tedious as a real-life party would have been with such a stereotyped guest list-the dumb cowboy star, the stuffy clubwoman, the fading movie queen, the international-society siren, the current sex symbol...
Director Peter Schandorff's production of Eugene Ionesco's absurdist exercise in British suburbia fails to get laughs that are usually pretty hard to avoid with this play. His actors, apparently unaware of much of the script's more subtle humor, work against the lines with an indiscriminate cuteness. Two of the funniest sequences, the exchange of coincidences between a married couple not sure they are married and the fireman's ridiculous tale of "the Headcold," fall dead. In the latter case, the actor actually reads the speech, stifling the spontaneity that is the crux of the joke. Most...