Word: punning
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...goes for ten or fifteen minutes. Total strangers confronting total strangers, making nervous small talk with artificial poise, watching through narrow eyes for the wrong color of socks, a grammatical slip or affectation, a pun or wisecrack in questionable taste. Then...
...discourse so predictable and boring that any deviation comes as a delightful relief. In his deeply unfunny Essay on Laughter the philosopher Henri Bergson theorized that the act of laughter is caused by any interruption of normal human fluidity or momentum (a pie in the face, a mask, a pun). Slips of the tongue, therefore, are like slips on banana peels; we crave their occurrence if only to break the monotonies. The monotonies run to substance. When that announcer introduced Hoobert Heever, he may also have been saying that the nation had had enough of Herbert Hoover...
...conventions of the Pudding Show are like that--the student writers and performers can take all sorts of liberties as long as they stick within the chief boundaries. The audience is harangued when it hisses a pun: "Go drink some more champagne"; "C'mon, gimme a break, I have to say that every night." But the actors go right ahead with the next pun--that's what the people have paid...
...dance. They kick, tap, waltz, jump, charleston--in Serfs Up! they even roll over and kick their feet in the air. This year's kick-line has excitement, surprises, and laughs, and even if the rest of the show--or the people next to you remarking "Excellent!" at every pun--have left you cold, you won't be bored...
...that coined that term once again was more good commercial sense than homage to Nabokov. Although capitalizing on this latest fashion in exploitation shouldn't have to mean joining in gleefully, through much of Lolita that's what Albee seems to be doing. Where Nabokov will choose an elegant pun, Albee lunges for the obscene gag: where Nabokov will subtly makes you think about the arbitrariness of social rules, Albee has his dirty old man turn to the audience and ask, "Is there a pedophile in the house...