Word: one-upmanship
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...technical counterpart of this in Coward's plays is that he vastly speeded up the tempo of comedy. Relying on single lines of dialogue, he produced instant repartee in which talk became a blindingly fast game of inflective one-upmanship rather than a declaration of meaning or a display of passion. Even within individual lines, he inserted a word or phrase that mockingly deflated the emotion it expressed. Thus Elyot says to Amanda in Private Lives: "You're looking very lovely in this damned moonlight, Amanda." Repeated time and again, this approach almost makes Coward the granddaddy...
Rafelson peoples his landscape with the misfit fringes of go-ahead America: wheeler-dealers and sham artists, gamblers, petty crooks and rootless wanderers. Though outsiders, they still cherish a belief in Monopoly's promise, winner takes the jackpot. So they circle the board in a frivolous game of one-upmanship, until life sputters out in disillusionment or disaster...
Next on the list, "Hawkins and Grabber," written by Joel and Steve themselves. Set in the Stars and Stripes Forever Bar and Grill, the skit pretends show us two old war buddies, reunited for some mutual drinking and consolation. The joke is that under all their boasting and one-upmanship (Hawkins is in oil, Grabber builds planes, Grabber has one Rolls Royce, Hawkins has two) there is only a couple of scared men threatened by a world of "commy pinko cruddy bums." The fact that that last line is meant to get a knowing laugh should give you some idea...
Aside from the one-upmanship values of a trip to China, the joys of China travel are largely inscrutable. There are few of the usual tourist attractions that draw the average American globetrotter. Museums, closed in the confusion of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in many cases have yet to reopen, though Imperial Peking's excellent Palace Museum can be visited if special permission is obtained...
Political one-upmanship in Mexico frequently comes in the guise of a comic book. All factions can and do compete to produce the cleverest and most convincing interpretation of national events. Last week a new comic hit the stands. On the cover was Miss Liberty in all her Grecian-gowned glory, about to be done in by sinister men armed with rifles and long Turkish knives. Were those the Russian and North Korean flags over their heads? They most certainly were. This unabashedly patriotic comic, the handiwork of a wealthy, middle-aged illustrator named José G. Cruz, spins...