Word: humors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Whether or not Cummings intended it to be so, his lowbrow humor is the high point of the evening's entertainment. The slapstick in the second act also cuts the play into three fragments; it is so funny that the audience has trouble readjusting to the alternately tortured and wry self-analyses of Him and Me continued in the third act. After seeing Him two or three times the connoisseur might learn to prefer Cummings' obscurer opening and closing acts to the exuberant shenanigans in the middle. At first sitting, however, the second act serves up Cummings' garish tastes...
...when she doesn't under stand him, she says, "That does not compute." Curiously enough, this remarkably human robot is being played by Julie Newmar, and typecasting has rarely had a brighter hour. A strong-minded, singleminded, career-minded girl with a unique sense of humor, Julie speaks in terse, direct and sometimes disarming sentences that seem to have been programmed on punch cards that say PLEASE DO NOT FOLD OR BEND. No method actress has ever found a more empathetical wave length with the character she is playing. "Rhoda is the ultimate consciousness," says Julie, "the ultimate reality...
Since much of the laughter excited by Pussycat is cruel, put-down humor, the why of its comic impact is almost more interesting than the how of it. Nobody much believes in love any more; Broadway has not seen an old-fashioned nonmusical love story in years. This is intimately linked to the image of the modern woman, who does not seem real, at least onstage, unless she can spar, jaw-to-jaw and eyeball-to-eyeball, with her man. As Ibsen would have been the first to recognize, Nora competes at home nowadays, and the doll's house...
...number. Later, in a howling display of virtuosity, the duo intertwine legs, arms and hands and march their fingers up the keyboard in a centipede's version of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody. With the election over, Borge has also decided that the White House is in humor's public domain again: "I had the great honor [muttered aside] and vice versa to meet the President of the United States-Gentleman Bird. He approached me at 70 miles per hour, lifted me up by my ears, and pronounced me a Great Dane...
Occasionally, Burroughs' hollow humor draws a hollow belly laugh, as when one Nova Mobster, The Subliminal Kid, eggs on the civilized world toward a mind-shattering collapse by playing over and over (on loudspeakers that cannot be turned off) unrelated sound tapes of jack hammers, jukeboxes and cocktail-hour persiflage. But mostly the novel is a stream of unpunctuated non sequiturs, in which coherence seems inadvertent and in which Burroughs' scatological and pornographic effects no longer seem to shock...