Word: thurbers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This fiftieth anniversary Album of Drawings (an overly pretentious title for a not-at-all middle-aged collection) juxtaposes Booth, Lorenz, Saxon and Koren with Thurber, Arno, Hokinson and Irvin, along with William Steig, Charles Addams and Whitney Darrow, to chronicle a half century of the idiosyncracies of the American species. If some of the cartoons seem to depend too heavily on the actual social conditions of their time, we can rely on our memories and our knowledge of human nature to see their humor...
...talk about all 93 cartoonists in this volume would be boring and futile. They are all funny. My personal favorites are Price, Koren, and of course, Thurber. Too much has been written on Thurber to make it worth going into him here, but most of his great work was done for The New Yorker, and it fits better into this collection than it does into Thurber anthologies. I like Price's angular bodies and Koren's furry ones; my roommate likes Booth's cats; and Hilton Kramer thinks Steinberg is the only decent one among them...
...Thurber figure dominates nearly all of the fifteen sketches which comprise the show. This character's vacillation from cynical to maudlin and from macho to castrated propels the show's bitter but sometimes precious humor. The play is full of disturbed men who can't decide what role to play, who can't tell, as Thurber never could, whether they're coming or going. A would-be wife murderer cowers when she threatens him with a monkey wrench. Walter Mitty fantasizes that he is Bogart, Patton, and Dr. Christian Barnard, but his wife can't seem to take him seriously...
...does The Day the Dam Broke, a classic Thurber apocalypse, succeed as a twenty minute dramatic monologue, although Kerry Konrad struggles bravely through it. But in the second act, where the skits are fewer and the acting more demanding, everything comes together, culminating in James Doherty's painfully schizo portrayal of Walter Mitty...
...Thurber is a classic American wit, and if this production works it is because of his writing. Like his stories it is flawed and evasive, but who can resist the disarming deviance of the little woman who smiles blandly at the audience and says "I never dreamed their union had been blessed with issue till their daughter stabbed the superintendent of schools...