Word: laughingly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Levine. He never wants to give up directing plays on the stage, and he has ideas he would like to implement. He thinks Samuel Beckett, for example, is a great comic playwright who is too often treated solemnly and reverentially. "Endgame" he says, "is a fall-down laugh riot," and he would like to prove it. But if he is ambitious, he also has a sense of limit. "The theater properly belongs to the playwright," he says. "A good theatrical director is one who gives the playwright what he deserves. In fact, I get a little edgy at theatrical directors...
ABSENCE OF A CELLO is a bright, laugh-every-other-minute comedy demonstrating that a free-spirited scientist cannot be stamped into a cog-sized mold...
Something More! is masquerading as a musical comedy. It is tune-deaf and laugh-free. Lyrics like "tortoni, spumoni, and oh, my, minestrone" are better eaten than heard. The setting is Portofino, Italy, but the mood is about as authentically Italian as frozen pizza...
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...
...measure of the excellence of Jonathan Black's Seagull that it never does seem ridiculous. This is not to damn with faint praise. The opening night audience was knowledgeable and nervous. It knew what was potentially amusing and tittered at the slightest awkwardness. Everyone seemed to be dying to laugh out-right. But Black and his cast practically never let them...