Word: comically
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Maggie Smith, a superb actress, is a peerless comedienne. With her own fractured regality, a tenuous dignity that seems to invite comic disaster, she can make haggard bits like tripping or falling out of bed seem instantly fresh and funny...
These films depict, after all, nonsensical, episodic, comic sex -- hardly the stuff of "adult" life. I can't imagine what kind of perversity or anti-social behavior they could generate except, perhaps, an occasional fist through the ticket-window in blind rage at the exorbitant prices charged to see them...
...themselves into by proposing to their beloveds under the false name of Ernest, Algy pops countless muffins into his mouth with fastidious greed. It is in such moments that the story of their romantic complications (resolved only after everyone has said a lot of terribly clever things) sows its comic seeds and reaps its harvest of laughter. The production succeeds because its cast and crew passionately commit themselves to being passionlessly and uncommittedly stylish...
...landmark in American comic writing, Portnoy is not the final assimilation of the American Jewish novel. It is a complete cannibalization of it into the American Jewish anti-novel. Isaac Singer may continue to write marvelous stories about immigrant Jews; Saul Bellow may continue to chant the prayer for the dead over our decaying cities. But it is doubtful that anyone can ever write about the American Jewish family again without having his work ruefully compared with Portnoy's grotesque shadow...
This is a vigorous, thoroughly entertaining revival of Clare Boothe Luce's saucy 1936 saga of bare-knuckled Eves. Interestingly enough, the play is something of a rarity in terms of the U.S. theater's comic tradition in recent decades. We have grown accustomed to kooky comedy, sight-and-gag comedy, situation comedy and even black comedy. But Mrs. Luce writes social comedy...