Word: wordplays
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...Spectator. He is a rugged, independent Christian humanist who confronts an age that has depersonalized and secularized his values. Such novels as The Doctor Is Sick, Devil of a State and A Clockwork Orange are not only cautionary satires but examples of Burgess's flair for Joycean wordplay and knack for turning out novels that entertain as well as instruct...
...peculiarly British obsession with both perpetrating and denouncing scandalous activity, the play poses special difficulties for American performers. The Winthrop cast meets its challenge with modest skill, and no pretense of doing anything more than presenting a funny play. The script plasters over its mediocre theme with superficially brilliant wordplay; the director and cast make the best of it by paying the theme as little attention as possible and playing the verbal trickery for all it's worth...
...might make that exclamation about the novel itself. First the riches. The book is full of De Vries' happy wordplay, metaphysical Wiffle Balls, witty oxymorons (Peachum describes himself as a "self-pitying stoic") and perversely amusing ironies (a house burns down because of faulty wiring in a smoke detector). There are also the author's ticklish ways with the jargon of three generations, throwaway lines ("A writer is Like his pencil. He must be worn down to be kept sharp"), and a dandy piece of burlesque when Peachum tries to undress Officer d'Amboise in her patrol...
Tynan pays his respects to criticism in shrewd analyses of Richardson's performances and brief exegeses of Stoppard's plays. But mainly the author aims to please both his subjects and his readers. He is dazzled by Stoppard's stylish pessimism and flashy wordplay, yet wisely blocks him from the company of Beckett, Nabokov and Oscar Wilde. Deftly, Tynan puts his judgment of Stoppard in the book's foreword: "A uniquely inventive playwright who has more than once been within hailing distance of greatness." The piece itself is an adulatory delight, especially a scene in which...
...have been around since the early '30s, when Sidney Joseph Perelman first began publishing his superbly crafted hilarity in the pages of The New Yorker. The magazine's readers soon developed a tart tooth for Perelman's brand of satire, a mix of burlesque and Joycean wordplay boldly colored by a fastidious disdain for the fake, the tawdry and the pompous. Even the titles of Perelman's "bits of embroidery," as he called his pieces, set new boundaries for comic absurdity: Somewhere a Roscoe; Beat Me, Post-Impressionist Daddy; Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Enough; Insert...