Word: comically
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...theater lives within the le thal limits of a terrific hit or a castratory flop. To get to the top is a demanding task; to stay at the top is a grueling or deal. Nobody knows more about that than Neil Simon, or deals with it with such consistent comic verve...
What the switchboard operators heard was definitely not mellow-speak. Not laid back either. It was sheer, white-hot anger. The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and half a dozen other papers had yanked Garry Trudeau's Pulitzer-prizewinning comic strip Doonesbury, and thousands of irate devotees wanted to know...
...Prime Time Players, Murray had broken into the show by serving as unofficial second banana to the stars, John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd and Gilda Radner. When he finally seized centerstage, he stopped being a straight man and became a live -or maybe frazzled-wire. Murray is a master of comic insincerity. He speaks in italics and tries to raise the put-on into an art form. His routine resembles Steve Martin's, with a crucial difference. Where Martin is slick and cold, Murray is disheveled and vulnerable. One feels that Murray's manic behavior is a cover...
This plot is not so much developed as witlessly reiterated. For comic relief we are offered a detective whose sublime faith in computers is never rewarded by solid leads. We also get a hired killer who indulges in kinky sex simply because such escapades are an obligatory part of Hollywood packages like this. One expects fantasies in the newish jet-set genre (The Other Side of Midnight, The Greek Tycoon) to be unfelt, but it is always a little surprising to find them so poorly observed. Almost any of the gos sip columns that provide the raw material for these...
...cadaver should ever endure what Sellars does to the Dogberry/Verges scenes--his chopping reduces them from a major element of the play's structure to mere comic relief. It's tempting to look at them that way, of course, and in the uncut script their scenes do go on forever. But as with all of Shakespeare's plot problems that tempt foolhardy directors to cut and re-order, this one had a point...