Word: sketched
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Most of the characters are hysterical too much of the time for anything meaningfully comic to occur. It's like a prolonged night-club sketch. Andy and Norman know how to wisecrack like second-rate Henny Youngmans, and use this to put Sophie at a disadvantage. She can only spout whatever middle-Americanisms that the New York Jewish quipster-author felt right for the moment. I would for the life of me like to recount some dialogue for the record, but it is all so inert, so clearly the work of a hack intent on a string of easy laughs...
Whatever the merits of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint as a novel, it is certainly the greatest closet nightclub act of our time. In sketch after sketch, Roth cuts into the family and sex life of a Jewish neurotic until funny bone and inflamed nerve ending become indistinguishable. "I'm caught in the middle of a Jewish joke," cries Alexander Portnoy to his psychoanalyst, "and it isn't funny...
...Beyond-you know how far that is?" Ackerman: "So?" Death: "So where's gas? Where's tolls?" Nat: "We're going by car!" The Chrysler to oblivion could easily have been concocted by S.J. Perelman. The master parodist's influence shows in another sketch. Notes from the Overfed. Allen writes, after reading Dostoevsky and Weight Watchers magazine on the same plane trip: "I am fat. I am disgustingly fat ... My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat ... If there is a God, then tell me, Uncle, why there is poverty and baldness...
...graphics "expert", no doubt to modernize the appearance of two for one. The result is a hodgepodge of old and new that serves mostly to clutter up the paper. There are so many boxes throughout the pages--particularly the editorial and society pages--that layouts resemble an architect's sketch for a high-rise complex, only with copy filling the gaps where windows and air should be. The editorial page is adorned with one of those snappy buglines that saturate the paper, "View Point," and if you can look at the page long enough to read it, you'll find...
This year's second Dump Truck, a literary-political sketch of George Orwell by Garrett Epps, tries to place the man once again within his time. The author has tried not to abstract Orwell's writings and deliver them to us as pronouncements. Instead, Orwell's works are described in dynamic terms, moving closer to clarity and comprehension as Orwell moved through contemporary events...