Word: rueful
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...figure out what I've hit on. Some day a man will walk into my office as ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher." Underlying the satire is a rueful equanimity and a lingering hope, one sometimes found in both Catholics and Southerners, that there may be a point to the working and watching, that there may be one day a kingdom for the exile...
Butt, cuckold, buffoon-Hirsch gives Georges Dandin the engaging dignity of self-knowledge, the man who says his own name with the rueful shake of the head that makes it ring through the play like a bell, the shrewd peasant who knows he has made a bad bargain in a wife, the naif who thinks he can prove it to the parents from whom he bought...
...Dandy and the Tradesman. Elegiac, autumnal and melancholy though it is, Home is shot through with rueful humor. Playwright Storey subtly draws an ironic parallel between the plight of the two men and the fate of England. The word island recurs: England shorn of empire, reduced to her physical boundaries, but with names and deeds of the past intoned like a faint requiem of glory-Newton, and Sir Walter Raleigh and the discovery of penicillin. The sceptered isle has become a gleamless cinder on the tides of history...
...Comedy is criticism" means that the comic spirit jabs a deflationary hatpin into vanity and pretension and pomposity-just as Bob and Ray do. Their comedy reflects a society that is inundated with talk. Their chief target, the interview show, affords a shock of rueful recognition to everyone, for who has not spent hours of his own prime time listening to the dull conversing with the fatuous, or to Babel lecturing Babbitt? Bob and Ray have thrown a net into this noisy, restless, self-important sea of totally irrelevant information and fished up the audience's own image...
...result, Oh! Sex Education! (Praeger; $7.95), is a small journalistic masterpiece of rueful perception. With her first book, Mary Breasted takes her place among the Joan Didions, Gloria Steinems, Gail Sheehys-the journalists of grace-note disillusionment, all those sharp young women who look at their fellow Americans with the sad-eyed vision of little girls whose dolls were broken at an early...