Word: comically
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...artists are familiar figures in American literature, though they are usually directed through culture's back door. Their calling card was written by a 19th century popular comic character named Simon Suggs: "It is good to be shifty in a new country." Gary Lindberg's elaborate study The Confidence Man in American Literature, uses Suggs and his cronies as models to examine the national character. The task requires the assistance of that old critical handyman, ambivalence...
DEATH REVEALED. Fredric Wertham, 86, author and psychiatrist who crusaded against violence in comic books, movies and television; on Nov. 18; in Kempton, Pa. Wertham, a Munich-born authority on criminal psychology, argued that violence is a product of cultural influences. In his books Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and A Sign for Cain (1966), he contended that violence in the mass media was in part responsible for juvenile delinquency. He called television "a school for violence," and commenting on movies, he wrote, "If I should meet an unruly youngster in a dark alley. I prefer...
...wisest character in King Lear is the Fool, an observation few statesmen notice until the work of comic artists brings them down. In Masters of Caricature (Knopf; 240 pages; $25) the productions of savage and subtle comedians from William Hogarth to David Levine pass in review. Ministers of the 19th century wither under Daumier's derision; Thomas Nast sweeps out Tammany Hall; George Grosz annihilates Germany between the wars. But Historian and Art Critic William Feaver's text also makes room for such sly performers as Sir John Tenniel, who created a Wonderland for Alice, and Sir Leslie...
...Japanese art of wood-block prints flourished in the late 18th century when masters like Kitagawa Utamaro illustrated kyoka, a form of comic verse. In A Chorus of Birds (Metropolitan Museum of Art-Viking; unpaginated; $17.95), the season's most unusual book, Utamaro's animated sparrows and hawks, roosters and owls move through a fused world of nature, art and literature. A further enchantment: the volume is not conventionally bound; the accordion-pleated illustrations open into a 30-ft. frieze...
Only Ronald Brown, as Gitlow Judson, avoids the pervasive half-hearted mugging and posturing. Judson, Purlie's feisty brother-in-law, retains influence over Ol' Cap'n by posing as the stereotypical obsequious cotton-picker. Brown swaggers and staggers through the play's increasingly disjointed action with true comic aplomb, bawling "There's More Than One Way of Skinnin' a Cat" with reckless disregard for his tone-deafness, and applying his sense of dramatic timing to the moments that his cohorts largely let slip...