Word: thurberism
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Mourning the japesters' heyday of James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Frank Sullivan and Robert Benchley, aging (54) Poetical Punster Ogden Nash laid the blame for lost laughter to the cold war and a generation of young writers "who feel it their business to attack incest." Invited by Night Beat TV Interviewer Al Morgan to select one poem from the Golden Trashery of Ogden Nashery most likely to survive the ice age 'of creeping exurbia and the great woolly adman, Nash moodily recalled "some hair-of-the-dog-gerel from my unregenerate youth: 'Candy is dandy, but liquor...
...WONDERFUL O (72 pp.)-James Thurber-Simon & Schusfer...
With this darkling confidence, readers are off on a voyage into the vast punumbra inside Humorist Thurber's head. Nothing is credible, yet all might have happened at any moment between waking and sleeping. Black and his beastly pirate crew land on the island of Ooroo ("It sounds like the eyes of a couple of ghosts leaning against an R," shudders Black) and proceed to knock the 0 out of everything. They smash in doors and cupboards, rip roofs off houses, dismantle towers, drain pools and ponds. But all they find are opals and moonstones, not the valuable...
...there are four 0-words the people refuse to give up: hope. love, valor, and one other that remains not too mysteriously hidden until the final pages. The islanders rebel and, with the aid of beneficent magic, rout the pirates. Like his charming 1950 fable, The Thirteen Clocks, Thurber's new fairy story is written for a special breed of children and adults-those who like their anagrams and riddles sprinkled with poetic dust. Curiously, the author deprives Pirate Black of an argument that might have won the Ooroovians to his cause: even with the abolition...
...guests. "They were like a bunch of uncles to him," says Fadiman. As a tot, Charlie played with Philosopher Adler at a highbrow game of "neologizing" (inventing words in sentences to sound like a foreign language). As a youth, he played word games with Cornwall Neighbor James Thurber, who was so taken with Van Doren's acting skill ten years ago as the lead in an amateur production of The Male Animal that he recently began trying-before Charlie became famous-to persuade him to take a role in a play he is preparing for Broadway next season...