Word: comically
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...anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, Nobel prize-winner Konrad Lorenz, Raymond Dart--discoverer of the first Australopithecene. Robert Audrey--author of The Territorial Imperative and The Hunting Hypothesis, Desmond Morris--author of the Naked Ape and other who try to portray ancient man as the vicious truncheon-toting caveman caricatured in comic strips. Leakey contends that such aggressive people could never have survived--they would have killed themselves off. To the contrary, man has succeeded precisely because he has learned to cope with his fellow...
...puts on a hilarious show: He pats his gargantuan stomach as lovingly as a child might fondle a stuffed Teddy bear. He raises his bushy eyebrows so high that one expects them to graze the ceiling. He turns the mere act of getting up from lunch into a dainty comic ballet. Ordered by his doctor to lose weight-half his weight-Morley adamantly refuses. "I have eaten my way to the top," he announces in his most imperious manner. "I am a work of art created by the finest chefs in Europe." Robert Morley is indeed a work...
...that he is "thoroughly ashamed" of the essay in which he announced his joining of the Communist Party. He also notes that the party dropped him as soon as the essay was published, because he admitted having once doubted the total legitimacy of the Moscow trials. There is a comic poignancy to this imbroglio that pervades nearly all of Spender's political writing. His well-meaning, intellectual support of proper causes always left him at cross-purposes with improper people. He occasionally blinked at excesses, but he was never able to blind himself for long...
Though one was mainly a novelist and storyteller and the other a born play wright, Turgenev is sometimes regarded as a precursor of Chekhov. But even the similarities between the two great Russians are deceptive. Chekhov drew a bitingly comic profile of the follies that his provincial characters are prey to; yet he shared their pain. Turgenev fired off comic volleys that riddle his provincial characters' vanity and pretension; but when his people bleed, he casts a cold and worldly eye upon the scene. In Chekhov, longing is the arrow of love, usually un requited; in Turgenev, idle fantasy...
...gives herself up to the irresistible charms of a confirmed ne'er-do-well. The film, in fact, aspires to little more than giving the audience a good belly laugh every 15 minutes or so. Your funny bone is taken good care of, all right, but a stand-up comic can do the same thing in a fraction of the time. Once the chuckling subsides you are left with just another low-budget Western and a vacuous feeling. Vacuous because the film is silly, and vacuous because you have to sit through all the gunfights, the gallows scenes...