First Congolese P.M. Lumumba / SUN 4-17-11 / Scottish psychiatrist R. D. / French walled city on English Channel / Tree-lined path in une foret

Constructor: Matt Ginsberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: "End of the Line" — 7 punch lines, or parts of punch lines. That is all.


Word of the Day: R.D. LAING (34D: Scottish psychiatrist R. D.) —

Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement although he rejected the label. (wikipedia)

• • •

I did not care for this one, despite finding a couple of the punchlines funny. Couldn't you just open any Giant Book Of One-Liners (or the equivalent) and just collect punchlines and then once you have critical mass, find pairs of equal lengths, and voila, puzzle? Especially if, as this puzzle does, you use *parts* of punchlines. Matt's puzzles usually feature spectacular, complicated, ingenious themes. This one ... doesn't. It's also got some ugmuff fill, all over the place. That PATRICE (14D: First Congolese P.M. Lumumba) / ALLEE (22A: Tree-lined path in une forêt) / MEOR corner is pretty bad. Also not digging IRID (50D: Crocus or freesia, botanically), and really not digging USAR. Mostly the fill is heavy on the short stuff (a preponderance of 3- and 4-letter answers), which the theme required you to hack through, since large chunks of the punchlines were simply not gettable (to me) without significant, sometimes almost total, help from the crosses. I knew the Woody Allen punchline at first sight and had a good idea of the gist of the Stephen King punchline; the Groucho one was reasonably easy to infer. The Mitch Hedberg one was funny, but everything after I STILL DO required crosses. The Bill Hicks one was the worst in every way. Couldn't pick it up at all. Didn't think it was that funny. And I'm not thrilled with the punchline from "Anonymous" (!?!?!). Also not thrilled that IN A PEDESTRIAN WALKWAY has as many spaces as IN A PEDESTRIAN'S POCKET, and is, to my ear, much funnier (for being both subtler and less morbid).



Theme answers:

• 23A: "I used to do drugs. ___": Mitch Hedberg ("I STILL DO, BUT I USED TO TOO")
  
• 36A: "The car stopped on a dime. Unfortunately, the dime was ___": Anonymous ("IN A PEDESTRIAN'S POCKET")
  
• 58A: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it ___": Woody Allen ("THROUGH NOT DYING")
  
• 68A: "Whoever named it necking was ___": Groucho Marx ("A POOR JUDGE OF ANATOMY")
  
• 79A: "You know what I hate? Indian givers. ___": Emo Philips ("NO, I TAKE THAT BACK")
  
• 101A: "I don't mean to sound bitter, cold or cruel, but I am ___": Bill Hicks ("SO THAT'S HOW IT COMES OUT") — there really should be a comma after "am" in the clue
  
• 120A: "I have the heart of a small boy. It ___": Stephen King ("IS IN A GLASS JAR ON MY DESK")
  

Cluing felt significantly harder than normal for a Sunday, perhaps because of the aforementioned preponderance of short stuff—short answers are typically much easier to turn up than longer ones, so perhaps to counter that effect, the clues were amped up. Difficulty achieve through vagueness as much as anything else. FEN could've been BOG (46D: Wet lowland), "SIT up!" could've been "EAT up!" (97A: Dinner table command, with "up"), FEAT could've been ... lots of things, probably. I had BELT (FEAT seems a really weak answer for 72D: Grand slam, e.g.). Didn't know ST. MALO or PATRICE, but everything else seemed at least vaguely familiar. Seemed a lot of higher-end French in the puzzle, though I'm mainly just talking about SEUL and ALLÉE. I appreciated the two or three laughs the puzzle provided, but overall it was kind of a disappointment, kind of a slog.

Bullets:

• 10D: J.F.K.'s successor (ARI) — do not like the presumed abbrev. equivalence of J.F.K. (initials) and ARI (a shortened form of a name)
  
• 56A: Biblical name meaning "hairy" (ESAU) — hairiness is pretty much ESAU's main trait. That, and getting screwed out of his inheritance.
  
• 75A: Sci-fi film with a hatching egg on its poster ("ALIEN") — ads for this film and for "The Shining" pretty much ensured that I had nightmares throughout the entirety of 1979.
  
• 87A: Crush, sportswise (OWN) — very contemporary. Nice.
  
• 124A: Classic role-playing game (D AND D) — as in "Dungeons & Dragons"
  
• 1D: Feature of many a Jet Li film (TAI CHI) — yay for a clue that recognizes TAI CHI as a martial art, and doesn't place it in a "dojo."
  
• 12D: 1960s doo-wop group with an automotive name, with "the" (EDSELS) — did they *want* to fail?

• 59D: Start of a fitness motto ("USE IT...") — not, as I imagined at first, "NO PAIN..."
  
• 100D: Ann Landers or Ayn Rand: Abbr. (PSEUD.) — I had them both as PRESByterians at first.
  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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