Word: wit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Damrosch, whose course Wit and Humor tries to explain what makes a good joke funny, is a little bit more established in the department than his newly arrived colleague, Wood, author of The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. But that didn’t stop either one from agreeing to an FM-orchestrated humor smackdown...
...people in motion. That's the spirit of Peter Cook's Instant City in a Field Long Elevation from 1969, a deadpan fantasia of a city with all its diversions that could be lowered from the air by balloon. The philosopher Francis Bacon once wrote that "the monuments of wit survive the monuments of power." If that's true, then these whimsical flights of fancy will still be around long after some of the uglier skylines have crumbled. Let's hope...
...story: boy meets girl, girl turns out to be his mother, boy kills father. Sophocles told it 2,400 years ago, as have many authors since. But few have tackled the Oedipal tale with as much wit, verve and retail success as Japan's Haruki Murakami has in Kafka on the Shore. The book sold 550,000 copies in its first month on his home soil in 2002, inspiring a sequel comprised of selections from the 8,870 e-mail critiques Murakami received and his 1,220 replies. Kafka has become a best seller in Germany, South Korea and China...
First serialized during the late '90s in the UK newspaper The Guardian, "Gemma Bovery" looks nothing like the mirthless "funnies" Americans have gotten used to in their daily papers. One can scarcely imagine the generosity of space and wit that would be needed to accommodate Simmonds' striking compositions, much less her racy and literate subject. As clever with her brush as she is with her typewriter, Posy Simmonds seamlessly matches swatches of strongly written text with expert spot illustrations and uproarious traditional panel sequences. "Gemma" makes for a rich reading experience, as well as a rewarding...
...Social satires tend to be pretty crude affairs in the world of comix. Cartoonists tend to succumb to the genre's temptations of broad, easy caricature. Posy Simmonds avoids this with her particularly English dry wit. Rich with memorable characters, literary depth, cutting humor and pictorial panache, "Gemma Bovery" sets a new standard for intelligent cartoon satire in graphic novel format...