George F. Walker has dominated Canadian English-language stage comedy of the late 1970s and the 1980s in a manner unprecedented since Robertson Davies achieved his comic preeminence in the 1940s and 1950s. Like Davies, Walker takes his comedy seriously, using it to present a coherent vision of the world, and, like Davies, Walker is an acute social satirist. There the resemblance ends. While Walker's vision is coherent, the world he sees is not; his is a dark comedy peopled with larger-than-life, obsessive characters addicted to self-analysis and hilariously misguided pseudophilosophical observation. Lineal plot and logical, psychological character development are seldom found in Walker's work, as the characters leap hysterically from thought to thought and action to action in a state of perpetual non sequitur and crisis. His dramatic style draws heavily on pop-art forms (cartoons, gothic melodrama, detective novels, B-movies), giving the plays their lurid coloring and frenzied...