Word: reductios
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...lesser commercial risk. Camp is low-level satire, and it tends to destroy both the past and the present with a snicker. Far from being a "great creative sensibility," as acclaimed by Susan Sontag, camp is anti-sensibility. Its intrinsic nature is sterile, and it applies the tactic of reductio ad absurdum to imply that all cultural values are equally sterile. Thus at one moment No, No Nanette fashions an affectionate valentine to the past, and in the very next moment perforates it with a derisory dart from the present...
Papp's company prances through this reductio ad absurdum. Especially good is Robert Ronan as a Ptydepe instructor lecturing a class on interjections: " 'Psst!' becomes 'cetudap,' 'mmnn' becomes 'vamyl,' the poetic 'oh!' is rendered in Ptydepe by 'hrulugyp.' Our very important 'hurrah!' becomes in Ptydepe 'frnygko jefr dabux altep dy sa-varub goz terexes...
Richler's basic weapon is the mace of reductio ad absurdum, which he wields with skill and ferocity. A publisher compiles a book that documents little acts of kindness shown by the Nazis toward Jews, and holds a benefit dinner for wives and children of deceased concentration-camp guards; a school play casts ten-year-olds in a staging of Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom; a teacher encourages the academic achievement of her boy students by rewarding them in an entirely extracurricular manner; a nun appearing on a Joe Pyne-style TV insult program is publicly reduced...
...Philadelphia 76ers are paying 7-ft. 1-in. Wilt Chamberlain $250,000 to play professional basketball this winter, and nobody can say that he hasn't gone all out to earn this record sum. Wilt, for instance, thought up a new basketball strategy called reductio ad absurdum. In seven seasons with the San Francisco Warriors and Philadelphia 76ers, Chamberlain averaged 39.6 points a game, and even got as high as 100 points in one game-yet his teams never won a championship. Last year, he was persuaded to shoot less and enjoy it more as a playmaker and rebound...
...targets were indistinct, the barbs not finely honed. Occasionally, as in its current issue, it found the mark. Piqued by what it considered excessive panoply surrounding the Adenauer funeral, the magazine noted that his body had been borne on an army truck and navy boat. In a neat reductio ad absurdum, it wondered in cartoons why the casket was not also carried under water by frogmen, helicoptered aloft, then parachuted back to earth, where it could have been loaded into a rocket launcher and aimed heavenward...