Word: comically
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...hilarious moments of good slapstick, and the deft spontaneous playing of Jack Oakie, this is the kind of picture that disappoints its makers and audiences because neither can figure out why it isn't funnier. The trouble really is that it is a comedy built around a comic situation. That is a dramatic fallacy. Only the great geniuses of slapstick-and Oakie's talent is not for that-can make a funny situation funny. Laughter comes far more easily from a "straight" situation that has been turned comic by some attitude that makes it ridiculous...
...assistant managing editor; before that time beginning in 1900 thirty years ago I had in the capacity of telegraph editor, city editor, news editor and acting managing editor, done my bit to keeping down the free publicity for snakes, but not always with complete success. Until the Bungle comic page of two weeks ago the record over the last ten years had been perfect. I have always disliked snakes and I have seldom met others, especially women, who did not share to some extent this feeling. I have always believed that it was good business principle not to carry into...
When Star readers picked up the Sunday comic supplement last fortnight they were more amused than usual. A startling thing had happened. There on the front page, in Cartoonist H. J. Tuthill's "The Bungle Family," was-not one little snake -but a long, fat, wriggling rattlesnake in bright green, yellow & red, in 15 different poses. When Mr. Bungle saw it he shouted in half-inch letters: "A SNAKE!" He then fought and wrestled gruesomely with it through four cartoon panels before it was revealed to be a dummy snake, the practical joke of another character in the strip...
Newsmen asked one another what had happened, could only guess at the answer. Perhaps some unlucky subeditor had blundered. Or perhaps the Star, unable to transform so many big snakes into other animals, decided in editorial conference that it could ill afford to drop out its ace comic, the Bungles, for even one Sunday. Or perhaps Publisher Longan suddenly and completely recovered from his snake-phobia...
Little Accident (Universal). The Elizabethans borrowed from old Latin and Greek plays a comic formula in which an arrangement of young lovers is shuffled, after difficulties, so that each character comes out at the end with a different partner. The formula has been successful in every later generation of the theatre whenever playwrights could think of new devices for causing suspicion, love and mistaken identity. In this instance the device is the birth of a child to the first wife of a young man (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) who is about to be married a second time. It is a homely...