Word: rabelaisian
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...moment his body was found in a Hollywood hotel room in March 1982, the victim of a drug overdose at age 33, John Belushi became the subject of an inevitable barrage of media scavenging. First came the newspaper stories, detailing the cocaine and heroin abuse that led to the Rabelaisian comic's early death. Then a book, Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, written by Watergate chronicler Bob Woodward. The tell-all tome implicated several of Belushi's Hollywood friends and associates for condoning, or at least ignoring, his self-destructive behavior...
...fact, Amis is quite the scold. His Rabelaisian comic gift cuts savagely at the patchwork of relativism and materialism that passes for modern social fabric. The novel's loutish hero, John Self, is a grotesque victim of life in the fast lane: "I hate people with degrees, O-levels, eleven-pluses, Iowa Tests, shorthand diplomas," says Self. "And you hate me, don't you. Yes you do. Because I'm the new kind, the kind who has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness...
...almost hear this eager whisper down the corridors of Orion Pictures: "The Hotel New Hampshire could be the Tom Jones of the American '80s." Same director (Tony Richardson), same teeming fresco of endearing eccentrics, same Rabelaisian appetite for sex as the main course in the banquet of life, same giddy mixture of the farcical and the funereal, same pilfering of every silent-comedy trick from fast-motion camerabatics to actors who step out of character to wink knowingly at the audience...
...NARRATIVE is leavened, however, by Erofeev's prodigal powers of comic invention. There are countless passages of Rabelaisian discourse. One entire chapter is devoted to a detailed analysis of Russia's greatest calling--hiccups. Another chapter is a bartender's manual for some of the most bizarre drinks ever conceived, including an unorthodox mixture of beer, two kinds of shampoo (one anti-dandruff), and insect repellant. The humor ranges from the highly subtle to the truly gross, most of it reasonably well-served by J.R. Dorrell's colloquial translation...
...with such seismic force. At 6 ft. and nearly 300 lbs., "Big P," as Soprano Joan Sutherland calls him, is more than lifesize, as is everything about him?ins clarion high Cs, his fees of $8,000 per night for an opera and $20,000 for a recital, his Rabelaisian zest for food and fun. "He is not primo tenore, " says San Francisco Opera General Director Kurt Herbert Adler. "He is primissimo tenore...