Word: shavians
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While the narrative line meanders a bit, and laughs do not detonate every minute, much of the evening consists of a fiendishly clever talkfest. Some of it is bantering class raillery, some of it Shavian disquisition-as when Mrs. Rogers delivers a monologue on the advantages of a strictly segregated society-and some of it prime non sequiturish zaniness out of the theater of the absurd. When Eugene goes into a huff, for in stance, and threatens to leave the apartment, Mrs. Rogers tells him that he must not go: "The time is 3 in the morning . . . streets are filled...
Though some traffic between the two houses exists on this level, most of it runs through the channels--or slips through the fingers--of popularizers and funny men in the pink-gloved Shavian tradition. But playing the dialectical scales with a ten-foot pole of fashionable sentiment tends to lopsided results. Such practices may sharpen the edge of wit but they blunt, if not miss, the point of dialectics. Hence the temptation to subscribe to the thesis that whatever the depth and seriousness of mind a dialectical command of reality requires, it must be incompatable with the temperamental high-jinks...
...bestselling book The Female Eunuch, is rarely without something shocking to say. Still, British readers who picked up her regular column in London's Sunday Times were bemused. IT'S TIME VD WAS SOCIALLY ACCEPTED, the headline announced, and the story went on to argue, with slightly Shavian logic, that the pox is now so prevalent that no one who has it should be obliged to feel guilty. "I wish at this point I could announce publicly I had had a venereal disease," Ms. Greer concluded. "Despite a lifetime of service to the cause of sexual liberation...
...played in 14 languages (plus television). Thereafter, as regular as the Internal Revenue Service, Simon has produced approximately one hit a year, among them The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite and The Last of the Red Hot Lovers. At one time he had four shows running simultaneously, a Shavian feat. In his spare time he confected the books for two successful musicals, Sweet Charity and Promises, Promises, and wrote several movies, among them the new and delightful Heartbreak Kid. Still, with all the disproportionate rewards (Simon owns a plush town house, a country place, a Broadway theater, real estate, cattle...
...temper of the times, Clumly seems bound for a caricature pig-of-the-week award, or else a New Centurion's badge for meritorious service. Instead, Gardner pits poor old Clumly against the Sunlight Man, a brilliant existential philosopher, French horn player, gadfly, madman, magician, murderer, idealist and Shavian exponent of Babylonian religion and the new consciousness. But when the smoke and the rhetoric and some cadavers have been cleared away, there stands Clumly (much humbled and wiser) as, by God, some kind of confused, committed, ignorant, rumpled, preposterous champion of Western culture...