Word: ruefulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...damage he had caused by calling some protesters bums, Nixon declared: "I am proud to say that the great majority of America's young people do not approve of violence. The great majority do approve, as I do, of dissent." Then he added a passage that might cause rueful smiles among veterans of antiwar confrontations: "It isn't the beat generation. It isn't the beat-up generation." Rather, he declared, it will be "the great generation...