Word: comically
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Potential hit or not, Grand debunks any notion that Carsey and Werner have a magic touch. Their shows until now have been driven by stars with well- developed comic personas. (Chicken Soup failed because it never created a plausible milieu for its star. Jackie Mason as a social worker?) Grand depends instead on an ensemble cast, which seems adrift with characters thrown together as arbitrarily as passengers on a lifeboat. Joel Murray has some funny moments as old man Weldon's flaky son, and Reed gives off sexy sparks as the trailer-park mom. But they don't keep...
Something about telephones is obscurely comic, related to some manic vaudeville. In your fist you clutch to the ear an object that looks ignominiously like the shining plastic cousin of a shoe. Designers have produced more streamlined models, but an essential ungainliness is inescapable. It results partly from the pressing of technology against anatomy. The technosmooth circuitry is pushed bizarrely against the old Darwinian skull. The talker's being comes unfocused from the visual immediate room and refocuses -- through the ear! -- elsewhere. The Here communes with There through sudden activations of breath, vocal cords, jawbone, tongue, lips, eyes, emotions. Through...
...black American people -- to argue against the notion that art is color-blind. Most American painters, in McElroy's view, put racial stereotypes in their work. These were usually negative. "Prosperous collectors created a demand for depictions that fulfilled their own ideas of blacks as grotesque buffoons, servile menials, comic entertainers, or threatening subhumans," McElroy writes in the catalog. "This vicious cycle of supply and demand sustained images that denied the inherent humanity of black people by reinforcing their limited role in American society...
...those staring into an empty January evening, this is the kind of good basic movie everyone hopes is lurking out there and rarely is. Shrewdly, unpretentiously written, energetically directed and played with high comic conviction, Tremors is bound to become a cult classic...
...always the same as sparking sales. During the last two months of 1989, Infiniti dealers in the U.S. sold only 32 cars a day, far short of the 134 sales a day of its archrival, Toyota's new Lexus (base price: $35,000). "On the other hand," quipped comic Jay Leno, "sales of trees and rocks are up over 300%." Now Infiniti's ad agency has released new ads originally scheduled to appear later in the first quarter. Prominently featured: cars...