Word: japes
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...furniture of Manhattan's Harvard Club, only to find the place set with traps. For cocktail-hour amusement before a dinner of the Friends of Harvard's Fogg Museum, the Fogg's director, tweedy John P. Coolidge of the Boston Coolidges, had arranged a jolly academic jape: the walls were hung with forged art-or was it all forged...
...solemn may try to see political satire in this jape. It is true that one of a pack of thieves says, "At least we're not nationalized yet," and an official-looking sign in a workingwomen's boardinghouse reads, "Chastity is the Best Policy! Don't See Your Husband." But the only real politics in this film is lunatic anarchy. Everyone mugs like mad, and if a sight gag falls flat, there is another along in ten seconds. It all serves as a reminder that the early-Hollywood, dead-run comedy used to be awfully funny...
...with market research: "So I was standing on the corner waiting for somebody to cross me because I'm not allowed to cross by myself. And this lady comes by, and she says, 'Here is a bubble gum sample. Do you chew this brand?'" A clever jape at advertisers becomes a brief bit of high comedy as the listener realizes that what the moppet is describing is a human being going mad from the shame of having to ask little girls questions about bubble...
...brand of authority; her hard prose seems armed with staring, baleful eyes. The reader may shudder in distaste, but those eyes fix and hold him. And yet, while her handling of God-drunk backwoodsmen is based in religious seriousness, it seldom seems to rise above an ironic jape. It is this suggestion of the secure believer poking bitter fun at the confused and bedeviled that lingers in the mind after the tale is ended-rather than the occasional flashes of pity that alone make such a story bearable...
While most of this yarn is expertly comical, Linklater's Scots satire does not sustain the brilliance of, say, Honor Tracy's jape at the Irish, The Straight and Narrow Path. Too many other elements (including Yacky Doo's mawkish death) intrude on the story's essential mixture of fondness and malice. But Author Linklater's entertainment survives its flaws. His most effective jest is at the expense of the reader who, eager to read the imaginary Burns erotica, leafs ahead to find some. The novel is salted with verses, but most of them...