Word: laughingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Woody Allen has built his career by making us laugh and look at our neighbors and ourselves. His characters in film and print inevitably exhibit the flaws we least like to admit in ourselves, but Allen can point that out to us only by making us laugh at them. When Boris goes dancing down the road with Death to Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kieje in Love and Death we chuckle Kieje was a hero but Boris certainly isn't, he's just another schmuck out of his element, a schmuck who got screwed, and a schmuck who admits...
Allen is a brilliant comedian, but he is an uncomfortable one. The man also invented the unwilling cocktail party crashing moose (And the moose mingled...) and redubbed a serious Japanese spy movie into an outrageous parody of itself knows he can make people laugh, but he wants to do more. There weren't many laughs in Interiors, and those in his most recent Stardust Memories made us uncomfortable, we couldn't relate to them...
Like Giinter Grass, his old colleague in the German writers' impromptu workshop Group 47, Lind has evolved less an answer to lunacy than a technique for exposing it. In every work he manages to reduce history to a wild nightmare from which one wakes up laughing. In his latest novel, with a nod to Jonathan Swift, grand master of the savage laugh and the surreal voyage, Lind sets sail on one of his most inspired trips...
...husband: "Looking back, I now see that it began with some tiny wistful remarks, made by him, when he would come across articles in the paper about swingers, swapping, singles bars. 'Well, maybe we should try some of that stuff,' he would say, with a laugh intended to prove nonseriousness." She traces the next stages, including a period of "a lot of half-explained or occasionally overexplained latenesses, and a seemingly chronic at-home fatigue." Moving on to his inevitable departure, the abandoned wife wonders how she could have been surprised...
There are no women in the diner, or at least none with any speaking lines. Crammed into a tight booth and certain of their terrain, the guys can relax and laugh at the world around them. At the weird kid who memorizes all the lines from the movie Sweet, Sweet Success and recites them to no one in particular. At the enormously obese man who manages to consume all of the items on the left side of the menu--"that's not a human," someone exclaims, "it's a building with legs...