Word: mordant
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tiger is a play of fumbled possibilities. It is a mordant reflection on a Negro mother to say that her highest hope for a son is a good death rather than a good life, and an acid play might have come of it. Playwright Feibleman opaquely implies that the Negro in the U.S. lives in a state of siege and self-corroding stratagems. But he has carried understatement to the point of no comment. He is so leery of the false premise that color affects everything that, as a matter of stage fact, he is trapped into arguing the equally...
...originals are members of the remarkable Minot family (Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra), a Hudson River clan that has subsisted for 200 years on no income at all. The Minots live by dining out, and walk safely the precarious line between guesthood and sycophancy by balancing good fellowship with mordant truth telling. For an author who does not resort to burlesque, this is not an easy notion to bring off, but Author Calisher does it delightfully. She ticks off the guestly ability of each Minot forebear, and then gets down to the problem of the current Minot, a moneyless widow...
Rogers was a terror in the courtroom. His pet technique was ridicule. Peering disdainfully at a witness through his lorgnette, flashing his mordant wit, he often provoked the jury to laughter-a near-sure sign he had won his case...
...proposal would short-circuit the constitution and has already enraged politicians of all parties, his grandiloquent dialogue between "you Frenchmen and Frenchwomen and my self" only heightened the curious blend of awe, irritation and amusement with which most Frenchmen today regard their President. Through endless anecdotes, his mordant wit and sovereign self-assurance have become as firmly lodged in the French imagination as Cyrano's nose...
...young Parisian named Martin who believes that "everything can be explained." With Martin, who has just been released after serving a prison term, Ayme takes a dreamlike but invigorating stroll through the contrarieties of Western society. He views men and women as obsessed by mutually contradictory impulses, and his mordant humor is best expressed by standing acceptable ideas on their heads. When one character painstakingly discovers irrefutable evidence that there is a God, he is persuaded to destroy it on being reminded that, for believers, "an absolute, demonstrated certainty tends to dispel faith and hope...