Word: thurberism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
LANTERNS AND LANCES (215 pp.)-James Thurber-Harper...
...James Thurber has become (he should excuse the expression) a senior humorist, but in this lively collection of recent rethurberations in The New Yorker and other magazines, he shows no evidence of age-except perhaps an amiable trace of second adolescence. He wages the war between the sexes as briskly as ever ("Woman's place is in the wrong"), heartily belabors "the child-overwhelmed culture," trenchantly elucidates the principle of "negative cheerfulness" ("One statistician not long ago tried to cheer us all with his estimate that only 18 million people, not 50 million, would be killed here...
Like most of The New Yorker's laughing boys, Thurber can be insufferably chatty ("This may not give you the creeps but it gives me the creeps"), and he suffers from the peculiar delusion that anything written about a cocktail party is bound to be funny. He also lapses frequently into college humor (speaking of nervous ailments: "Have you heard of the roofer who got shingles from Sears, Roebuck?"), and sesquipedalian prose ("Amidst verbal wonders and linguistic portents the stultification of English was caused by the decapitation of words as well as by unwonted lengthening"). But at his best...
...preliminary number on the Brattle card this week is a UPA cartoon version of James Thurber's fable for our time, The Unicorn in the Garden. An expansion of the theme ("Don't count your boobies before they are hatched") serves as the main event, with Humphrey Bogart compensating for the absence of technicolor...
Arriving in London as the sole American to join the West End version of last season's Broadway revue, A Thurber Carnival, Humorist James Thurber, 66, stated his canny reason for coming to Britain. "No one seems to die over here," said Thurber. "Every time they try to hold a memorial service, the corpse writes in to say he's feeling fine. In America, love after 40 is obscene, work after 50 is unlikely, and death before 60 is practically certain...