Word: tropes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...been born. His conversation had the pungency of a vanished era; it demanded, and got, a great deal of time and attention. It coiled and ran and turned back on itself, wandering off into apparent non sequiturs to test the listener, piling metaphor on private joke, allusion on trope, and then puncturing the entire edifice with some foxy...
Except for Will Rogers, comedy seems to follow the same trope that holds for religion--it invariably moves from east to west. New York comics hit the big time and move west to Hollywood, British humor sweeps westward across the Atlantic to the East Coast. Since the Second World War this ageless migration has been performed by Peter Sellers, Beyond the Fringe and most recently, Monty Python's Flying Circus...
...Fantastic Island (1935), a book Ian Fleming obviously ransacked when he wrote Dr. No, the villain is a mad Russian pianist who owns an isolated Galapagos island, feeds his guests to a horde of clacking crabs and explains this little character problem in a marvelously sappy 19th century trope. "I am impelled to unspeakable desires," he sighs contentedly, "when my fingers wander over the keys...