Word: comically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SAINT MAYBE by Anne Tyler (Knopf; $22). In her 12th novel, Tyler turns her ) generous sympathies and formidable skills to an investigation of the sources and aftereffects -- both comic and profound -- of religious faith...
...hubbub their little community can tolerate -- or a good movie requires. A poet manque as well as a sometime black marketeer, he has the manners of a thug and the soul of a romantic. When he is falsely accused of harboring the collaborator (and briefly jailed), his outrage, hugely comic but strangely blackened around the edges, is marvelous to behold...
Still, Memoirs is not all misanthropy and -ogyny. Amis gives a generous portrait of his shy, witty fellow Oxonian, the poet Philip Larkin, who like the author had to endure that most mannered of academic dons, Lord David Cecil. One sprightly chapter contains a mercilessly comic imitation of a lisping Cecil pointlessly beginning a lecture. ("When we say a man looks like a poet . . . dough mean . . . looks like Chauthah?") Cecil had the ill grace to flunk Amis for his B. Litt. thesis, but the author uncharacteristically lets bygones be. Perhaps it's too hard to stay angry with someone...
...thing DAN QUAYLE doesn't need is yet another publication poking fun at him. Nevertheless, a new comic book is about to tweak the Veep. Where's Dan Quayle? (Collier; $9.95) is a parody of the hugely successful Where's Waldo? children's book series, in which the game is to spot the title character inside an illustrated crowd scene. The Quayle send-up has the Vice President visiting the Kennedy Space Center, Red Square and Pebble Beach Golf Course...
Cartoonists from Jules Feiffer to Garry Trudeau have doubled as playwrights, for understandable reasons: both crafts use dialogue and visual narrative, and in both the best humor is rooted in personality. Lynda Barry, whose weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek appears in 55 newspapers, shows that her truest metier may be the stage in THE GOOD TIMES ARE KILLING ME, a sometimes campy yet mostly poignant off-Broadway memoir of blue-collar life in the '60s. The plot crams in far too much -- infidelity and divorce, the random death of a child, teen sex, Volare, bygone rock dances...