He was a wonderful man, serious, but with a wryness and touch of irony.
Warmth, wryness and a sense of bewilderment at the world are what bond these two and make them so eminently listenable.
There is always in his work a certain wryness, the boy trying his first shave with the dog looking straight at the viewer, amazed at the action of his master; the lonely fisherman carrying on in the pelting rain, his pipe upside down to keep it dry; the two charwomen in the theatre reading the programme of a grand show they could never hope to see.
Seeking advice from a succession of sages (played with a deliciously funny, subversive wryness by Ery Nzaramba), the reluctant new king is treated to a series of animal fables, nested within each other, that grapple, playfully and pointedly, with questions of fate, justice and responsibility.
Roddy Doyle contributes a touch of Dublin Grand Guignol, and for engaging irony and wryness we have Mary Lavin's "Lilacs", and Bernard MacLavery making a device for illumination out of a slight case of lockjaw.
Aside from some mild cheerleading for Boris Johnson, O'Rourke thankfully left his own politics at the door – and you didn't have to agree with him to be tickled by his wryness.
And there was humor as well as pathos: "Arms" was nothing to laugh about, but "Arena" (in which Marshall caricatured the denizens of an imaginary ballroom) evinced a knowing wryness.
Rinehart's hectoring, tin-eared public persona makes her seem as though she were born without the wryness gene.
(In Jacobson's "disputatiousness," there is little room for the wryness of Italo Svevo or Joseph Roth or even Anita Brookner, let alone that Mozartean quality of Bellow's comic joy).
The rewards of this approach become apparent when one compares the beguiling, humane, and self-observant character whose poetic wryness reverberates throughout "Revelations" to the stock tragic figure of the tortured artist enshrined in the only biography of Arbus that existed until this autumn.
Down Under, a high quotient of wryness, of jokes at one's own expense, has long been mandatory, both in private and in public.
