Word: joking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These effects are intentional, and they egg the audience to participate in an "in" joke, but the self-consciousness they enforce and the sniggering communal sensibility they impose lay heavily on the play. The emotional changes which should animate the third act are lost; the tension which should carry us over the hump of the comedy-only tautness can stave off boredom in humor-is flaccid...
...probably the U.S.'s poorest citizens. Their average life expectancy is 35 years; the village schools go no higher than the eighth grade. Spread over the state in 200 filthy, littered villages, they have little to do with the economy. Instead, they are patronized. "The typical Eskimo family," a joke runs, "consists of one father, one mother, three children, two anthropologists, one social worker, one economic-development specialist and two counselors...
...stage production: In this grim fable, the citizens of a small town foolishly ape the eccentricities of what they believe to be a wealthy aristocrat; at the end they discover that the object of their idolatry is in fact a real ape. Stripped of pretense by the cruel joke, the people stare helplessly at the ape while the camera mercilessly moves from face to face. Henze's music provides the ammunition. It is the camera that delivers the coup...
...early '60s already seem another world. Somewhere along the line, the theater of the absurd turned into the theater of cruelty, homosexuality became the matinee audience's concept of the in-joke, and Neil Simon went for meaning in the third act. The Beatles ran out of put-ons, and John Lennon took to bed. In accordance with Aubrey's Law, sitchcom has swamped or drowned television's handful of comic talents. Some Like It Hot shuddered into M*A*S*H, and the situation of cinematic comedy became a question of semantics. Debating topic...
...other and more direct therapies have been adopted. The ex-puritans are letting it all hang out. Sex has become a compulsory part of the American footrace for happiness. There goes the rationale of the dirty joke-not to mention just about every other joke that originates in repression. Since Oh! Calcutta!, voyeurism has become something one buys tickets for. And instead of making a wisecrack against the system, one now throws a brick through the window of the Bank of America. Who needs laughs when everybody is doing his thing? Like a patient who has just finished analysis...