Word: roth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sympathy. But the new radicals have generally chosen what "Red Rudi" Dutschke, who led West Berlin's student rebellion in 1968 and is still active in the Movement, calls "the long march through the institutions." The archetype of the new, sober, methodical and coolly professional radical is Wolfgang Roth, 32, the ambitious, mod-haired leader of the openly Marxist Jusos (Young Socialists), who have virtually seized from within the left wing of Chancellor Willy Brandt's Social Democratic Party (TIME, April 23). Instead of only taking to the streets, French Maoists are now working on assembly lines...
Then came Portnoy's Complaint, the public flowering of the Henny Youngman Roth, the brilliant cocktail-party mimic, hilarious storyteller and improviser of ingenious bits. His university degrees were set aside for the lessons learned on Newark's front stoops, where wisecracks and putdowns were the comic antitoxins against WASP sting and the guilt that could result from calling chicken soup consomm...
Going public with Portnoy turned Roth into a hot property and brought him the awareness that "being famous was like being a box of Oxydol." Our Gang, The Breast and now The Great American Novel (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $8.95) definitely have extra-literary dimensions. They are also packaging and merchandising problems. Our Gang, which began with ten pages of devastatingly accurate satire of Nixonian newspeak, quickly slid into labored collegiate humor. Grossly padded-including too many blank end papers and repetitive title pages-the book became a $5.95 hardback steppingstone to a profitable publishing venture. Ditto The Breast, whose...
...part of the same line. Ostensibly a baseball epic of the 1943 Ruppert Mundys, the book is to contemporary fiction what silicone injections are to topless dancing. It is an extravagant mockery of form, a freak show aggressively thrust at the public. "Read me big boy till I faint," Roth seems to be saying, in a paraphrasing of Portnoy's burlesque-queen fantasy. He seems to have cleaned his desk drawers of every party bit and wild turn. He has also researched his subject, spending hours at the baseball Hall of Fame and leaning heavily for inspiration on Larry...
Like Henny Youngman, Roth keeps batting out giggles, averaging about .265. Like Richard Nixon, he must make everything perfectly clear. Roth distends everything beyond the operating limits of farce. He seems out to do nothing less than debunk every myth of American life. Top on his list is the notion of winning by fair play and sportsmanship. In a total inversion of those Boys Life inspirational stories, Roth tells of Gil Gamesh, a pitcher so great that he refuses to obey the rules...