Word: comically
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Richard Dreyfuss commands top roles, top billing and top dollar in Hollywood, but it has always been hard to accept him as a top movie actor. Though his brash energy holds the screen, Dreyfuss has built most of his characters from a single emotion-an intense comic anguish. At his best-in American Graffiti, Duddy Kravitz and Close Encounters-he can be ruefully witty and vulnerable. His jittery neuroticism keeps an audience guessing whether he might really fall apart. But there is also a persistent feeling that he is hiding behind a pat routine. When Dreyfuss portrays the same boyish...
...Birthday Wish (Little, Brown; $5.95) is equally textless-save for a greeting on the final page. But within its elemental comic-strip layout a series of hilarious sight gags are set up and sent home. Author-Illustrator Ed Emberley has never been a man to pull his punch lines, and his jokes are often a bit too raucous; but then so is the laughter that ensues from their close inspection...
...Fonzie, the motorcycle-crazy greaser of Happy Days, he raises '50s cool to the boiling point. The Fonz is no different from the hero of any other ABC sitcom, but Winkler does not settle for mugging his way through the role. Instead he galvanizes the tube with shrewd comic timing and swaggering sexuality he gives the audience Bugs Bunny crossed with James Dean, and each week some 47 million Americans go wild...
DIED. René Goscinny, 51, creator of Astérix, France's most popular comic strip; of a heart attack; in Paris. Astérix, a diminutive Gaul, was a spokesman for all the shrewd little guys who fearlessly take on bigger adversaries-not for ideological reasons but in order to be able to eat, drink and be merry. Three weeks before he died, Goscinny realized his dream of being syndicated...
...disorienting disclosure of the performers' gender. All along, The Club has been a bastion of masculinity whose patrons have seemed enamored of their lifestyle and loath to relinquish it. But suddenly we learn that the play is intended to reflect what women believe men think. Throwing off its comic guise. The Club reveals itself to be social commentary...