Word: wordploy
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...encounter starts benignly as Alice reads a newspaper to her six-legged acquaintance. But the double-entendres soon begin. Whenever Alice encounters a creature, the reader can hear a pun drop. The wasp, for example, mistakes Alice for a bee because she has a comb. Typically, wordploy is incessant, and terror lurks just beneath the surface. At one point the wasp takes off his wig and stretches out one claw toward Alice "as if he wished to do the same for her." "The cutting off of hair," writes Gardner, "like decapitation and teeth extraction, is a familiar Freudian symbol...
...Such wordploy is the mark of the DeVries oeuvre, at once its most noticeable-and least significant-characteristic. For between the punch lines, DeVries shows himself as a lapsed Calvinist who sees the world as a reproach to that incurable hypocrite, man. Irony is DeVries' weapon, and this collection of fugitive pieces extends his gallery of not always humane inconsistencies. When a worker obeys a "Think" sign, he is dismissed for woolgathering. An executive boasts of an affair he was strong enough to resist. But after his wife's resulting diatribe, he is furtively making plans for consummation...
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