Word: comically
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...parodies of Lewis Carroll and Kipling. In The Political Jungle Book, Lord Balfour, the hapless Prime Minister, is called "Sheer Khan't." Throughout Saki's life, Celtic mysticism and foreboding, plus a raw strain of patriotism, kept trying to break through the veneer of satiric wit and comic, cultured urbanity that made him celebrated as man and writer. Langguth notes that he knew "the frustration of an adventurer's soul locked in the body of a clerk." Soon Munro left London again to become the Morning Post's correspondent in the Balkans, covering the bloody rivalry...
...settled down in England, with a small income, a conservative club (the Cocoa Tree), a cottage in Surrey (for Ethel) and growing celebrity as a writer of comic short stories. But nobody ever takes a comic writer seriously, and, Saki complained, "a humorist is almost invariably expected to be funny for life." As World War I approached, he grew discontented with the coffee-spoon London world that had provided him with targets for satiric comedy, as well as with himself for belonging...
Langguth wastes little time trying to decide whether Saki was a literary butterfly who finally tried to stamp or some kind of shrike with a sense of humor. The book notes the Waugh-like gift for comic names (Loona Bimberton, Septimus Brope), the Wildean wit, the Wodehousean way with the featherheaded fauna of the West End and the country house party, the surprise endings self-consciously borrowed from O'Henry...
...games. Many readers were offended by Irving's mating of the truly tragic and grotesquely comic, by the car crash that kills little Walt and removes Michael Milton's penis, by Roberta Muldoon, the transsexual football player, and the Ellen Jamesians, the radical feminist group whose members cut out their tongues to protest rape. Among those with reservations was the author's mother. Says Frances Irving: "There are parts of Garp that are too explicit for me." Literary heroes like T.S. Garp and John Berry of Hotel New Hampshire challenge social dogmas and traditional sexual roles. Although...
...play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee-make life on the big bench seem. Jill Clayburgh plays the perky, conservative new lady in chambers; Walter Matthau is the bearish liberal Justice with whom she has a tastefully tentative comedy-romance that turns out to be neither very comic nor very romantic. Mostly they argue about things like pornography and corporate responsibility. These discussions are conducted at the high school civics-class level, and it must be said that Ronald Neame's direction suits them admirably, since it is at the film-school level...