Word: ribald
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Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote. Holly Golightly, a kind of cornpone geisha, weaves her willful way among Manhattan's towers in a ribald and strangely touching story...
...Almond cannot always afford the judicial view. Sworn to a no-surrender policy against integration, he can fan dangerous emotions with the best of demagogues, warning that the Supreme Court will soon "make it lawful for a Negro to intermarry with a white person," describing civil rights programs as "ribald, unconstitutional, politically designed, cheap and tawdry" or "communistically conceived and sponsored...
...stage set got in the first dig: the houses of old Munich were actually stylized caricatures of the city's sobersided medieval citizenry. Against this background unfolded the ribald tale of Kunrad, a young sorcerer, whose ardor for the virgin Diemut scandalizes the whole town. Derided and humiliated by them. Kunrad takes his revenge by magically extinguishing every fire in Munich, leaving the helpless bluenoses in chilly darkness. Kunrad delivers a 20-minute homily to the chastened Münchners (dramatically cumbersome, but Strauss insisted he had written the opera only for the sake of that speech. Soon...
...myself moved on O'Neill. His diffidence seemed to have gone. We repaired to one of the Shamrock bars... We drank ale. We continued drinking ale until four in the morning, feet on the rail, one hand in the free lunch. It was just one of those nights. Ribald tales, anecdotes of experience, theorizing about the drama--what collegians used to call a `bull session.' A bull session de luxe...
...comes the switch. Stalin is posthumously purged by Khrushchev & Co., and the spiral of official truth spins into reverse. Simochka, it appears, was right all along. T.T. is back in the center of his absurd universe, and the bribes fly back from the terrified recipients. Thus Novelist Grinioff extracts ribald comedy from his central theme: under tyrannous government, humanity exists in the corruption of its officials. It is human crookedness that can best the inhuman game...