Word: comically
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...nice, easy gift for unforced farce (see Ferris Bueller's Day Off). The other is that his teen romances (see Pretty in Pink) have always insisted that the American underclass is actually superior to its middle-class betters in worldly wisdom and moral acuity. Both his comic virtue and his social vision are on pleasant display here...
...turnaround. Gelbart attributes the Masonic cult to nostalgia: "Jackie is one of the few practitioners left of a style that appeals to an older audience. It's like listening to the Glenn Miller Band." Steve Allen compares Mason with Lenny Bruce: "He is more than a joke-joke comic; he is a philosopher." Mason seems to be the only one who admits that he is a "sensation for the same Jewish jokes that made me a failure." Perhaps, he thinks, it is the setting: "In the theater they see ; you as an artist instead of a bum telling jokes...
...depicts and the humorous episodes he describes. The serious often descends into the sentimental and the humorous into the cute. One moment, the family's house is burned to the ground, forcing them to move in with mother's grandparents. But no sooner are they there then Grandpa's comic zaniness changes the mood, as he interrupts breakfast on the veranda to shoot at a rat in his vegetable garden. The scene is absurd enough to make a Scrooge laugh, but it hangs loosely between serious scenes of death and destruction...
Wolfe will most likely be denounced for creating comic characters who accurately reflect familiar and self-important fixtures in New York life. At the top of the heap are "social X rays," rumpless women of a certain age who believe one cannot be too rich or too thin. Sixtyish men of this stratum are frequently accompanied by "lemon tarts," sleek, young blonds. Sherman McCoy is a decent well-bred sort, neither more nor less lustful than most confident 38-year-old males and particularly amusing when he gives facts and figures about how one can go broke in Manhattan...
...authority as a novelist. This, and his ability to handle an imaginative and intricate plot that welds his descriptions of dinner parties, restaurant games, Wall Street trading and courthouse chaos into more than a tour de force. Even at more than 600 pages, Bonfire moves with a swift comic logic. It has become a critical cliche to say that a book is hard to put down. Those who think that they can casually dip into this one, fuhgedaboudit...