Word: lowbrow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Welcome to the retrofuture. It's a time when they're fighting a high-tech intergalactic war but talking about it in the kind of lowbrow rhetoric--hysterical jingoism--we haven't heard issuing from movie screens since World...
DIED. BURGESS MEREDITH, 89, chameleon-like actor who performed the highbrow and lowbrow with equal enthusiasm and success; in Malibu, Calif. His Mio in Winterset (1936) simmered with earnest indignation; his Penguin in TV's Batman was gloriously over the top. He played the gentle George in Of Mice and Men, the careworn coach in Rocky and even did a gravelly voice-over for Skippy peanut butter. Meredith defended his quirky choices, saying, "I'm a man moved by the rhythms of his time, so I'll just take amusement at being a paradox...
Often, Naked comes off simply as lowbrow comedy in highbrow style, though the book's finest moment, in "ashes," is a haunting and serious meditation on his mother's death from cancer. But when we arrive at the final essay, the title piece, we realize Sedaris wants to do more than be funny. He spends time in a nudist colony not only to poke fun at people but also to be able to present the world in all its unadorned vericose-veininess, its rippling obesity and sexual deformity: not a bright or pleasant vision, but a deftly-delivered one that...
...bear breaks the chain, pulls off White Sut's head, and leaves it in the middle of the main road. This is widely regarded as a good joke. So is a courtroom altercation (12 dead, including the judge) in which Zeke tries earnestly to kill another lowbrow Beck. "Why dammit, I thought I had Davie choked all the way dead," he says, amazed to see a man he had just spent 10 minutes strangling rise up and wander down the street. "Usually when a man's eyes roll back like that, he's thoroughly kilt.'" It may be quibbling...
...home page is among the hottest places on the Net--a top attraction on Prodigy, despite the page's lack of advertising, graphics, sound, color or flashing pyrotechnics. Or maybe as a result: Walter Miller's Home Page is just writing, hilarious writing, in the long tradition of lowbrow American satire. Think of Huck Finn, Forrest Gump and Beavis and Butt-head all channeled through the persona of a 20-year-old, acne-speckled, "boy-gennius programmer in the booming computer industry." Walter Miller's Home Page is little more than misspelled accounts of his exploits, posted...