Best of
Comedy

1960

The Most of P.G. Wodehouse


P.G. Wodehouse - 1960
    G. Wodehouse collection ever published. In addition to Wodehouse's best known and beloved Jeeves and Bertie stories, The Most of P. G. Wodehouse features delightful stories about The Drones Club and its affable, vacuous members: Mr. Mulliner, whose considered judgment on any and all topics is drawn from the experiences of his innumerable relatives; Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, the man of gilt-edged schemes; and Lord Emsworth, ruler of all he surveys at Blanding's Castle. Rounding out the collection are Wodehouses's witty golf stories and a complete and completely hilarious novel, Quick Service. As Jeeves would say, "The mind boggles, sir."

Auntie Mame


Jerome Lawrence - 1960
    Besides being the source for one of America's most popular musicals, AUNTIE MAME set a standard for Broadway comedy that's been sought after ever since. "Auntie Mame was a handsome, sparkling, scatterbrained and warm-hearted lady who brightened the American landscape from 1928 to the immediate past by her whimsical gaiety, her slightly madcap adventures and her devotion to her young nephew, who grew up to be Patrick Dennis. Through fortunes that rose and fell and a pleasant but brief marriage to a likable Southerner, who had the bad luck to tumble down from the Matterhorn, Auntie Mame's chief concern was that nephew, whom she raised [the play's] central figure is a woman of spirit, innate kindness and undefeatable courage " NY Post.

3 By Flannery O'Connor


Flannery O'Connor - 1960
    This anthology includes the masterpieces Wise Blood, Good man is hard to find, and The Violent Bear it Away.

The Groucho Letters


Groucho Marx - 1960
    He writes to comics, corporations, children, presidents, and even his daughter's boyfriend. Here is Groucho swapping photos with T. S. Eliot (”I had no idea you were so handsome!”); advising his son on courting a rich dame (”Don't come out bluntly and say, 'How much dough have you got?' That wouldn't be the Marxian way”); crisply declining membership in a Hollywood club (”I don't care to belong to any social organization that will accept me as a member”); reacting with utmost composure when informed that he has been made into a verb by James Joyce (”There's no reason why I shouldn't appear in Finnegans Wake . I'm certainly as bewildered about life as Joyce was”); responding to a scandal sheet (”Gentleman: If you continue to publish slanderous pieces about me, I shall feel compelled to cancel my subscription”); describing himself to the Lunts (”I eat like a vulture. Unfortunately the resemblance doesn't end there”); and much, much more. That mobile visage, that look of wild amazement, and that weaving cigar are wholly captured, bound but untamed, in The Groucho Letters.

Pomp and Circumstance


Noël Coward - 1960
    'A South Sea Bubble of a book it is, with a Royal Visit expected on the Island of Samolo, and the narrator, a mother of three, dealing with everything from chicken-pox to the amours of a visiting Duchess' (Daily Telegraph); 'If there is anywhere on earth where the old Coward world still credibly lingers on, it is probably a fairly peaceful tropical colony ruled over by a British Governor General . . . Coward's long cast list might have walked out of one of his better comedies' (Evening Standard); 'It is all good, near-clean fun, magnificently readable' (Sunday Times).

The Killer, and Other Plays


Eugène Ionesco - 1960
    In The Killer, a three-act drama staged with great success in Paris and London, he creates a study of pure evil. Bérenger, a conscientious citizen, finds himself in a radiantly beautiful city marred only by the presence of a mysterious, irrational killer. Bérenger's determination to find the murderer in the face of official indifference, and his final defeat at the hands of an impersonal, pitiless cruelty are the elements of a parable which speak with the universality found in Kafka's The Trial. The Killer, says Pierre Marcabru in Arts, is "Ionesco's best play...Never has despair had such a tone, at first ironic and ultimately lugubrious. Here good will and hate clash in an implacable encounter where evil triumphs...Ionesco has transcended his own earlier dramatic limits. Beginning with a verbal revolt, he has reached a point of logical revolt."In Improvisation, or The Shepherd's Chameleon, Ionesco plays the part of himself facing three learned scholars who claim to know better than he what he should write and how he should set about it. Inspired by one of Moliere's farces, Improvisation is a wildly hilarious comedy that sets forth the playwright's own ideas of the theater. The last play, Maid to Marry, creates a comic frenzy out of the phony verbiage in a conversation between a man and a woman.

How space rockets began


LeGrand Henderson - 1960