Word: manic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although the two comedians are an era apart in terms of both material and audience, they share a manic energy level. Martin channels his into creating absurdity; Bruce turned his attention to pointing up absurdity where it already existed in the world. Both are funny, but Bruce's humor reveals a string of little paranoias that inhabit people's minds. Both shock, but Martin's humor includes more shock simply for the laugh value of surprise...
Loose Change started out as a promising idea: a kind of updating of The Group, a Mary McCarthy treatment of three women who attended Berkeley in the early '60s, then went caroming through the rest of the manic decade trying to understand both themselves and the cultural eruptions all around them -an impossibility. "In that time that decade which belonged to the young," writes Davidson, "we had thought life was free and would never run out. We were certain we belonged to a generation that was special. We did not need or care about history because we had sprung...
There's a scene in Between the Lines, a film about a small, alternative Boston newspaper, in which Max the manic rock critic rambles insanely to a group of rapt college students on the crucial question facing modern civilization...
...movie Network, a manic anchorman exhorts his listeners to proclaim through open windows that they won't take abuse any more. In real journalism, Jack Newfield screams a similar demand, but he wants his audience to protest in closed voting booths. Rage rather than dementia drives this full-time muckraker-one reason why his novelty value has survived six books and hundreds of articles; few can match the fresh indignation he brings to old scams...
Tomfoolery is a schoolboy's idea of manic anarchy; he cannot destroy the foundations of dominance without destroying himself, so he resorts to the mockery of mimicry. What he doesn't realize is that his mimicry deprives him of identity (just as the best parody is only barely distinguishable from its victim), and he, the mocking schoolboy, becomes the personification of his school. Similarly, denatured anarchy can exist in the King's Court, the eunuch in the harem, and the Harlequin can blend into the royal robes. Christ, the ultimate fool in his renunciation of worldly existence, can exist...