Word: hysteria
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Since then Price has specialized in a sort of incongruity that borders on surrealism. Key to his humor is the casual gravity with which his long-faced, sprain-skulled characters regard the most highly improbable situations. Drawn with a fast line that gives them the appearance of earnest hysteria, his characters look like ailing vegetables...
Time was when the Marx Brothers' talent for violent lunacy whelped the belly-wrinkling hysteria of such superb stage and cinema farces as The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, A Night at the Opera. Big Store is just the Marx Brothers nostalgically going through the motions of helping Detective Wolf J. Flywheel (Groucho Marx), Housekeeper Wacky (Harpo Marx) and Pianist Ravelli (Chico Marx) catch a killer in the bargain basement. Absurdity (as in the incredible chase sequences) is substituted for comedy...
...THESE BONES LIVE-Edward Dahlberg-Harcourt, Brace ($3). A violent blowtorch of poetic anarchy, turned on U.S. literature and such related subjects as the State, materialism, sex, war, tradition, human docility. At its worst it verges on literary hysteria; at its best it has rare eloquence, insight and daring. The book will either bore or infuriate any average law-abider...
...full page appeal for a last stand to prevent American intervention strikes the dominant editorial note, while other editorials applaud the Corporation's position on the Naval Academy incident, support National Anti-Poll Tax Week, and condemn civilian defense preparations as unnecessary and conducive to war hysteria...
...Many conditions may cause symptoms of pseudocyesis. Sometimes, in older women, an apron of fat develops over the abdomen at menopause. Other women may have large tumors, or their abdomens may be distended with air. Most common cause is hysteria: an intense psychological desire for a child creates a muscular spasm which pushes the abdomen out. Treatment varies : purges may be helpful, or the muscles may be worked into place while the patient is under an anesthetic. Since most of the cases are hysterical, Dr. Rutherford thinks pseudocyesis is psychiatry's baby...