Word: comically
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...best ways to kill a performance is to move ahead of the audience's prejudices. Thus Jay Leno and David Letterman can get away with portraying Bill Clinton as a pig and a lech only because viewers have already come to the same conclusion. It is our comic shorthand for Clinton. Of course, all public figures exist in shorthand versions, comic or not--that's what being a public figure is all about. For someone like Princess Diana who suffers a dramatic and untimely death, the tragedy becomes our Rorshach response: Diana, the tragically slain princess. Like J.F.K., the tragically...
...disprove the stereotypes but to make light of them and show that hey, they're no big deal; the whole point is that none of this should be such a big deal, but is made to be. There's no edge, no grit: it's the sanitized, homogenized Hollywood comic vision of a Greenleaf, Indiana, learning to accept gays, if not to be perfectly politically correct about them. "In & Out" isn't particularly subtle or inventive, but it's shrewd enough to be a comedy about homosexuality that won't make most heterosexuals uncomfortable...
...synthesizer set on bouncy autoplay, monotone Swed-glish vocals, bare-bones lyrics of dubious syntax-this is the medicine that sweet Doktor Kosmos dispenses. Of course, you'd never actually want to listen to most of it for any length of time, but it's a cute, often masterfully comic item nonetheless...
...Doktor's comic genius may be what really routs your brain. "Yes it is many times you doubt on the human" takes the background music from a televised real estate catalog and plays a sample of fiendishly incomprehensible speech with Jamaican-English rhythms. You'll spend hours trying to decipher it and may, in fact, go insane. ("Sweet love for my nation?" Perhaps...
Basically, barring a couple of dead-on newbies, the best of this year's festival are the oldies-but-goodies: the endless, playfully mean riffs of "No Neck Joe"; the pitiful, worst-nightmare explorations of the body's connective tissue in "Lloyd's Lunchbox"; and the masterpiece of comic timing, "Dirdy Birdy." These shorts endure and generate fresh laughs with every viewing just like any sturdy, well engineered joke or skit...