Word: slapstick
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...lightness and elegance, even while displaying enormous technical virtuosity. The overture to the show is accompanied by an elaborately intricate dance sequence which conveys the mood of Renaissance Harlem street life, and distinctly resembles Wilson's work in the revival of Guys and Dolls in New York, although less slapstick and faster paced...
...heroine's psyche. Italicized chunks of Joan Foster's latest gothic romance pop up just when one is expecting the next chapter in her life. The reader is kept off balance by jagged shifts from the comfortable ordinariness of situation comedy to the casual cruelty of slapstick farce to the gripping panic of surreal nightmare...
...Manhattan college, surrounded by "feather bedding illiterates" and "reactionary pedants." Visiting Professor Fain notes: "Our full professors, tenured faculty, teach H.B.A., or Hours by Appointment; that is, never." Students are awarded "Prior Life Experience" credits for such things as raking famous people's lawns. This may look like slapstick. But it sounds, to anyone who has brushed against academe, horribly true. Paragraph by paragraph, vignette by vignette, Speedboat hilariously builds an unsettling case: truth is slapstick. No wonder attentive, sensitive people begin to go weird: "A 'self-addressed envelope,' if you are inclined to brood, raises deep...
...Slapstick, Vonnegut...
...others, the girl on roller skates pushed toward--oops--the audience...but the performance tripped on the untied shoestring of its imperfect technique and fell flat. The man who was to catch the roller skater stepped out from the wings about 100 feet of stage too early, etc. Slapstick succeeds only if there is a firmly controlled base, an unshakeable structure in time, space, and the coordination of the two; the Tanz Forum, lacking this, could only slap...