Word: comically
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...wisdom gaily bestowed on lesser mortals. Though it crinkles with warmth, it is exactly one shade too pleased with itself. Emma could be one of nature's noblewomen, if only she would stop trying to stage-manage other people's lives. Graceful and witty, she is a goddess whose comic flaw is that she wants to play...
...comic conceit of the confusion caused by look-alikes has been used everywhere from Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors to "The Patty Duke Show" to "Parent Trap." But the technology in "Multiplicity" is seamless, and Keaton does a good job of giving each of his xeroxes a distinct (if somewhat stereotyped) personality. There's the first, harried Doug, who loses serious likeability points for suggesting his wife quit her new job because even with two of him, he can't handle taking care of the kids. The second Doug, who takes over the construction job, becomes macho and tough...
...example of the movie's comic sensibility lives and breathes in the character of Special Agent Milton Dammers, that crazy FBI agent. You see, the funny thing about Dammers is that he is knowledgeable about the occult--and also pretty strange himself! That means he hides behind doors a lot and, for no discernible reason, cannot stand when women yell at him. Ultimately, we find out he has scars all over his chest and (gasp!) perhaps might not be as good-hearted as we thought...
...proposition with which young Jennifer Belle cannot argue. The 28-year-old Manhattanite has received a great deal of publicity for her comic first novel, Going Down (Riverhead Books; $12; 254 pages), primarily because of its subject: a year in the life of a young woman who becomes a prostitute to pay her tuition at New York University. Right away we know we are in for humor of the zanily incongruous sort because Belle has given her heroine a some-of-my-best-friends-went-to-Exeter name: Bennington Bloom...
Alan Ayckbourn's book builds, with deft comic logic, from a tangle of mistaken identities to the climactic remark, "There's a cat-burgling pig in my bedroom!" Lloyd Webber's tunes are inventive and sweetly chipper. The effect is of two precocious lads putting on a genial public-school charade. By Jeeves may not be lighter than air, but it's surely lighter than Guerre...