in the pages of the book, a wink to the reader because you will deliver a set of ideas and then groucho marx steps in from stage right and throws in a little bit of a line? >> i am allowed this because it's a schtick. i think, you know, it happened when it happened. i begin the book with a story of two parents worrying about their soldier boy son in a plates we talked about in egypt. the father has failed to get him his kiss and the father, we only have the letter from the father. the father is very shifty about sailing, his son, he is going in to dangerous territory. he starts to do exactly what jewish boys know jewish fathers do. he is not feeling so well. the implication being don't give me a hard time. and then i say, and then at the end of this letter, you know, so many thousands of years old, from 475 bc, the three words which all jewish history spring, likewise, your mother. there is no argument. you always have to be wary that you are not kind of embarrassingly and creepily throwing modern dress on people who truly would not have known how to wear it or modern forms of speech. but eq

dignity is as lacking here as in a groucho marx movie or a punch and judy show. where shakespeare's characters speak in blank verse, exploring the whole range of human emotion, jarry's shout out crude threats and insults. and my god, madam, you really have come too far. it is clear that ubu roi burlesques shakespeare, but it is unlike the drama of its own time too. during an age when ibsen and chekhov were commenting in their own daring ways on the beliefs of their society, no one was quite like jarry. other playwrights put daring words into the speeches of their characters. jarry provided characters who are distortions of people, anatomic miracles and sartorial disasters. ibsen, with his well-made play, suggests that once social laws and attitudes are changed, the world may be an orderly place for reasonable people to live. other playwrights examine the inner lives of characters or puzzled over a philosophy worth believing in. only jarry, by emphasizing the base, brute-like passions of cartoon characters in a chaotic play punctuated by rude music, suggests that