He speaks in the hardboiled language of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but Thompson goes out of his way to accentuate the character's freakishness.
Jake is a strong man with a strong voice, whose freakishness is confined to his race.
So I have no idea by what freakishness of inattention Mr. Shawn had approved my application, a few years earlier, to go around rural Georgia with a woman who collected, and in many cases ate, animals dead on the road.
Walk up! Walk up and see the Fat Lady and the Monkey Man and the Living Skeleton and the Three Famous Hermaphrodites!" But the freakishness that Coward is actually justifying (and disguising) is not so much his selfishness as his homosexuality.
But, as the list of questions continues, you notice that, amid the oddities, the habits described become more ordinary: "Shall I often look up words in my dictionary, like R.?" Or, "Shall I get a little arthritis in my hands, like C.?" Or, "Shall I always read with a pencil in my hand, like R.?" What is being described, one gradually surmises, is not freakishness but just life itself.
Every mother-in-law joke you've ever heard, along with every Oedipal fantasy, is distilled into this formidable figure, and Redgrave, herself both the product and the matriarch of an acting dynasty, makes the freakishness of parental fervor sound entirely natural.
To fully inhabit one's delusions, to give in to every kooky aspect of one's freakishness — it's a handy survival strategy.
Despite the obvious freakishness of the situation, a dim sympathy arose within Robert as the surreal backed into the practical, the impossible losing its singular meaning.
A local night club once hired an African dancer, knowing that his freakishness would draw customers.
They were unaware of their utter freakishness, unaware that the world found them absurd, as they toiled in the tunnels below the Famous Directors and the Masters of Horror, like clueless C.H.U.D.s.
(Grode) ★ 'Play Dead' (closes on Sunday) The magician Teller directed and helped create this gleefully gruesome frightfest for grown-ups, in which Todd Robbins, noted light-bulb eater and expert in sideshow freakishness, discusses death, afterlife and some particularly creepy historical figures while working some very effective tricks.
