Word: comically
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Morris (Mickey) Sabbath is a 64-year-old former puppeteer with a prostate gland that belongs in the Urology Hall of Fame. In addition, the randy creation of Philip Roth's new comic novel (Houghton Mifflin; 451 pages; $24.95), is an Olympic-class misanthrope, an example of homo invectus so addicted to wrath that he rejects suicide on the ground that "everything he hated was here." "Roth still has the power to shock and amaze, although he's lost some of the fresh manic energy of 'Portnoy's Complaint' (1969)," notes TIME's R.Z. Sheppard. "Some readers will find...
DIED. PHIL HARRIS, 91, singer, bandleader, comic, of heart failure; in Rancho Mirage, California. Harris' hepcat persona was a fixture on radio in the '40s on the Jack Benny show and, for a time, in partnership with his wife Alice Faye. In 1947 he had a hit song with Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette). Today, he's known to the vcr generation as the voice of Baloo the Bear in Disney's animated Jungle Book...
Arnold's nervousness may have another source: his sense that show-biz careers wane more easily than they wax. "Good things don't always last," he says. "Even great stars like Schwarzenegger have had some very rough spots in their lives and their careers." The stand-up comic who went from Mr. Roseanne to Mr. Who? has more reason than most to heed that lesson--even from the top of the heap...
...illustrate: when Drake revisits his homeland, he finds skinheads and old aristocrats smelling of mothballs and sauerkraut eager to make him King of Hungary. Fortunately, the possibility is more comic than cautionary. Drake recoils at the thought of honoring his "curse of identity." So does Hungary, which, despite its share of popular reactionaries and Codrescu's imaginative efforts, is holding on to the beginnings of an enterprising democracy. A Blood Countess II might update the author's fears with a female descendant of Elizabeth Bathory who builds an international cosmetics empire with beauty products based on an old family formula...
Hiaasen, a columnist for the Miami Herald, is a funny fellow who regards human Floridians as a notch below palmetto bugs in matters of ethics and compassion. His new crime novel about South Florida, the sixth in a very good run, is caustic and comic. The author's method hasn't varied since the first, Tourist Season: turn over a rock and watch in glee and honest admiration as those little rascals squirm in the light...