Word: nebbishes
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...pieces, Thurber was a master of turning a homely personal detail--his troubles with his housekeepers, say, or the night his bed collapsed--into an affecting, hilarious story. Thurber's character Walter Mitty, reduced to a life of fantasy in an otherwise banal existence, remains the quintessential twentieth-century nebbish...
Play it Again Sam [Harvard Square]: There are two distinct periods in Woody Allen's career. In the first, the bright red period, his vision was of the nebbish as a nebbish. In the second, the mauve and chartreuse period, it was the nebbish as an artist. Play it Again Sam is probably his best effort of the bright red period. In this latter day Casablanca scenario, Allen is a movie-going Prufrock who longs to be Bogie. Diane Keaton plays her patented delectable goof role, and cuts an unlikely Ingrid Bergman figure. You must love a movie with lines...
...some juvenile periphrasis: "doughty love-muscle," or "priapism," or "stallionoid condition." "My membrum," he writes, "betrousered, is truly rampant." Stingo gets drunk on two beers, runs from any sort of danger or disturbance, ejaculates prematurely--he is, in short, what the Jews he loves to stereotype would call a nebbish, the kind of person who, when he enters a room, gives the impression that seven people just left...
There is nothing wrong in general with the nebbish-as-protagonist, as Joyce amply demonstrated in The Dubliners. But when the author relies on us to see the staggering evil of the holocaust through his eyes, he needs to give the protagonist some kind of stature; Stingo crumbles under the weight of the apocalypse...
MENCKEN--excellently portrayed by Brian McCue '81--chortles with delight over Superman's fall from glory. Tweaking his moustache and swaggering with nebbish aplomb, McCue belts out his song, "So Long, Big Guy." McCue's expressive face, quizzical eyebrows, and fussy gestures clinch his characterization of the oily little reporter. He's such a wise guy, you feel like giving him a slap in the face...