Word: comical
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...This was something new in the newspaper comic strip. At mid-century the comics were dominated by action and adventure, vaudeville and melodrama, slapstick and gags. Schulz dared to use his own quirks - a lifelong sense of alienation, insecurity and inferiority - to draw the real feelings of his life and time. He brought a spare pen line, Jack Benny timing and a subtle sense of humor to taboo themes such as faith, intolerance, depression, loneliness, cruelty and despair. His characters were contemplative. They spoke with simplicity and force. They made smart observations about literature, art, classical music, theology, medicine, psychiatry...
...lifelong student of the American comic strip, Schulz knew the universal power of varying a few basic themes. He said things clearly. He distilled human emotion to its essence. In a few tiny lines - a circle, a dash, a loop, and two black spots - he could tell anyone in the world what a character was feeling. He was a master at portraying emotion, and took a simple approach to character development, assigning to each figure in the strip one or two memorable traits and problems, often highly comic, which he reprised whenever the character reappeared...
...Charlie Brown was something new in comics: a real person, with a real psyche and real problems. The reader knew him, knew his fears, sympathized with his sense of inferiority and alienation. When Charlie Brown first confessed, "I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel," he was speaking for people everywhere in Eisenhower's America, especially for a generation of solemn, precociously cynical college students, who "inhabited a shadow area within the culture," the writer Frank Conroy recalled. They were the last generation to grow up, as Schulz had, without television, and they read Charlie Brown...
While tout Hollywood purloins comic books for its scenarios, Joel and Ethan Coen raid noble antiquity: not just Homer's fabulous travelogue in verse but Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (for the movie's title) and MGM's The Wizard of Oz (for a delirious production number starring the Ku Klux Klan). Toss in enough gorgeous blue-grass music to make the movie's CD a must-have, and you get prime, picaresque entertainment. It celebrates the chicanery of the human spirit, the love of raillery and rodomontade...
...accident is plausible: it involves a hair dryer, a bathtub and an electric shock. The results are improbable: the victim, Gibson's Nick Marshall, an adman confronting a career crisis, is given a magical ability to listen in on womens' thoughts. As comic premises go these days, it is acceptable. One settles back to enjoy the advantages, personal and professional, that accrue to Nick as a result of his unexpected gift...