Word: mock
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...large measure, they share the same targets. Only bad writers literally hold nothing sacred; the best of the black humorists hold some things too sacred to be bleared with hypocrisy or smeared with prurience. So they mock with a cleansing mirth every emotionally supersudsed subject from sex and death to religion, patriotism, family pieties money, mom, war and the Bomb. They are as well aware as any conventional morahzer that the times are out of joint, but they choose to greet the dislocation with a jeer rather than a jeremiad...
...Toner gives the Ragpicker extraordinary fire in his mock defense, in fact a satirical indictment, of the oil seekers, and Earl Montgomery as the president scowls and plots so vilely that we are ready to cheer with the inhabitants of Chailot when he and his fellow conspirators are destroyed. Lynn Milgrim and Paul Schmidt make attractively childlike lovers, whose only reason for being in the play is to love each other. Everyone, down to the flowers-girl and the doorman, performs with grace...
Good writing is rare enough. Storytelling is an even rarer skill. A genuinely comic vision is beyond price. The Ordways has all three. Seven years after his doom-laden first novel, Home from the Hill, William Humphrey has made a surprising switch from tragedy to mock epic. The result is the most delightful novel so far this winter...
...murder plot itself, and the mock trial that follows it, Writer George Axelrod (The Seven Year Itch) and Director Richard Quine make the mistake of thinking that the muse of comedy is a rubber-limbed contortionist, and sometimes stretch the fun to the breaking point. Luckily, the supporting cast shows such spirit that Lemmon has to work hard for his share of the laughs. As the gentlemen's gentleman who would not hesitate one moment to help rub out a superfluous lady, Terry-Thomas hyphenates the movie with tomfoolery, holding whole scenes together by letting his face fall apart...
...trumpeted, and trumped-up, goals of nations and of wars. In Tolstoy's view, these are vampires of abstraction that suck real blood. The pinnacle of abstraction, as he sees it, is the great hero Napoleon. While the battle of Borodino is clumsily enacted onstage like a mock-up war game with wooden soldiers and generals, Tolstoy pursues the point that Napoleon did not have the foggiest idea how the battle would come out, and only a fumbling control over its course...