Word: yearners
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Andy Kaufman sheds characters like a cold-sufferer discarding Kleenex. He is not only this indomitable overreacher called simply "Foreign Man." He can be, as easily, a lowlife Vegas saloon singer named Tony Clifton; a heartsick yearner after a lost love from the seventh grade; a ringmaster for a kind of rainy-afternoon kiddie show, full of cartoons and silly songs. In all those guises, Andy Kaufman is a little like a stand-up Pirandello. But what adds particular piquancy to his lavish charades is Kaufman's adamant refusal ever to drop his own mask...
Consider Barnett Frummer. He is a radical for love's sake who finds himself stuck to the hot asphalt pavement after going limp while protesting housing discrimination. He is the hapless yearner for un-chic Rosalie Mondle, who might one day paint "Get Out of Vietnam" across his chest. He is the groping incipient gourmet (trying to out-cook his friends) who dreams that he is accused of eating Fritos. He is the poor chap who cannot get invited to those with-it parties Rosalie attends, "where whites gathered to be castigated by some prominent Negro." Says Barnett...
Georgie Winthrop is, in fact, one of Nature's ignoblemen. At 45, he is a onetime college athlete whose beef is long past prime, whose wife garden-clubs him with motherly contempt, and whose teen-aged children ignore him. Worst of all, he is an earnest yearner who writhes in the post of college vice president, a rank
Britain's Reginald Reynolds, a "confirmed serendipitist" (discoverer of unexpected treasures) and the author of a learned, witty study of sewage-disposal problems (Cleanliness and Godliness, TIME, May 6, 1946), is no nostalgic yearner for the boskier days of old. In Beards he stands aloof (and beardless), a lollipop in one cheek and his tongue in the other, and lets the pro-and anti-beard factions fight...
...last three centuries are on the grow. The scientist cannot stop them from growing because they are too easy, too plausible and too teachable. . . . [The Mob character] is a cockney character, self-confident, contemptuous and anti-cultural; it is very knowing and knows very little." But no yearner after yore is Critic Notch; he thinks the present age "most fascinating in human history;" despising and fearing Mob ascendancy, he wants "an emphasis on the nonutilitarian element in education." believes the basis of education should be "the self-sufficiency and self-reliance of the individual soul...