Word: pinwheel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sitting Room, which is funnier and more tightly controlled, makes How I Won look like a warm-up exercise. There has been no director of such prodigious comic invention since the halcyon days of Preston Sturges. Lester throws off sight gags and visual puns like some pyrotechnical pinwheel and molds character actors (Richardson, Roy Kinnear, the superb Michael Hordern) into a virtuoso stock company. But he also knows the value of good writing, and Charles Wood's script is a model of subdued rage and satiric precision. "I always used to say 'For Christ's sakes, drop...
...smatterings of early Sid Caesar and Steve Allen, and a-pie-in-the-face splat or two of Soupy Sales. But on Laugh-In, the calculated aim is to create a state of sensory overload, a condition that audiences nowadays seem to want or need. Blackouts, slapstick, instant skits pinwheel before the eyes; chatter and sound effects collide in the ear. Other TV variety shows can be dropped intact onto a theater or nightclub stage, but Laugh-In would be impossible anywhere but on television. For one thing, each show is stitched together from about 350 snippets of video tape...
Donald Barthelme's work creates the impression that something miraculous happened to him overnight-as if, blind from birth, he could suddenly see, or, fluent only in Urdu, he abruptly grasped English entire. The result is quite an explosion, a staccato burst of verbal star shells, pinwheel phrases, cherry bombs of Joycean puns and wordplays. Such a book is Snow White, an amusingly refurbished fairy-tale novel of the absurd-as episodic and pointless as a slow-turning kaleidoscope, yet just as strangely affecting...
...cementheads he adopts football lingo. Chorus the enlightened mastodons of the monosyllable: "It's fun to think." Soon Fodorski gets a chance to apply his Archimedean magic to the great gridironic decisions of educational life, like defeating S.B.I.T.'s football rival. Texas Mohammedan. Fodorski's human pinwheel and pyramidal enemy line-scaling plays make him "All-American coach of the year" and. together with a display of pectoral muscularity called Physical Fitness, give the show its most rollicking chorus routines...
...studies of abstract shapes, entwined like dancers, he produced a climactic picture (see color). It is a jigsaw of figures tumbling, hurtling, plummeting, yet all interlocked. As the eye examines them, they seem to begin to whirl, as if Léger had painted them on a pinwheel...