Word: thurberism
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This short scene, which might be described as a grey-out, is the work of Jules Feiffer, 32, who was once slyly described by Critic Kenneth Tynan as "the best writer now cartooning." Tynan obviously overlooked James Thurber, but Feiffer appears to have taken the hint. His first stage work, a revue called The Explainers, which is running at Chicago's new Playwrights cabaret theater, in some ways recalls Broadway's A Thurber Carnival, but it has a wry. gentle note all its own. It is also part of a growing Chicago school of humor (although Feiffer himself...
Lanterns and Lances, by James Thurber. More fun than a barrel of money...
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...