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by JayasankaranKK
I have a friend who generally reacts to a joke he’d heard before by way of a quip. “Same dog, different lamp-post,” he’d say.
No one likes a critic. Indeed, writers generally regard critics with the same enthusiasm lamp-posts reserved for dogs. It explains Mark Twain’s burst of spite after his newspaper columns were panned: “No one’s ever put up a statue to a critic.”
Twain may have had the last laugh: there are multiple statues of him in the US but none to a critic. Even so, Western education highly prizes critical thinking. One of the key books for General Paper in our Form 6 examination was John Doraisamy’s Understand and Criticise. It signalled the shift away from rote-learning to a more evaluative approach to education.
In any case, criticism’s good for the soul. “I like criticism,” said basketball great Lebron James. “It makes me strong.”
Occasionally, however, book, film or theatre reviews can be vastly entertaining. “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly,” said poet Dorothy Parker in a review of a book sent to her for that purpose. “It should be thrown with great force.”
Or take this laconic review of the film Ben-Hur. “Loved Ben, hated Hur.” The name of the unfortunate actress who played the female lead in the movie escapes me. (Editor‘s note: Perhaps it could be Haya Harareet).
The Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini was said to be temperamental. Once, after a recital, he turned on his hapless orchestra and shouted: “Assassins!”
Comedienne Joan Rivers can be acerbic but this put-down of actress Katie Holmes borders on the cruel. Holmes played the wife of John F Kennedy in a role that Rivers described as “so bad that he shot himself in the film.”
The music critic Bennet Cerf gave a thumbs-down to a performance he attended. “The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night…Brahms lost.”
Listen to Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle’s defence of Donald Trump. “Trump’s nothing like Hitler…there’s no way he can write a book.”
Could there be anything more scathing than Roger Eben’s review of Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles: “I’ve seen audits that were more thrilling.”
When pressed for advice, actress Tallulah Bankhead had this to say to a young actress; “If you really want to help the American theatre, darling, be an audience.”
When you live in glass houses…This was what critic Alexander Woollcott said about Bankhead’s performance as Cleopatra on Broadway: “Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night….and sank.”
Only Mark Twain would be egocentric enough to put Henry James down: “Once you’ve put one of his books down, you simply can’t pick it up again.”
This is guaranteed to lightly turn the minds of a young writer to thoughts of suicide. “He is a writer for the ages…for the ages of four to eight,” grumbled Dorothy Parker, that eternal malcontent.
But one doubts if former politician Jeffery Archer would be fazed by this comment: “The last time I was in Spain, I got through six Jeffrey Archer novels: I must remember to take enough toilet paper next time,” groused English entertainer Bob Monkhouse.
We’ll leave the final word to the incomparable Groucho Marx: “From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter: someday I intend reading it.”
WE