Word: comically
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...certainly seemed to be for the nearly 5 1/2 million Americans who lined up singing and laughing across America on Memorial Day weekend to raise money for the hungry and homeless. Hands Across America was but the latest in a series of pop-charity extravaganzas-- Farm Aid, Comic Relief and Live Aid --that have raised somewhere around $81 million over the past year for farmers, the homeless in the U.S. and the starving in Africa. America's fascination with celebrities, so often demeaned as shallow and voyeuristic, has been turned into a vehicle to aid the least celebrated. Says Rockefeller...
Unlikely-seeming stuff, any of this, for the makings of Broadway musicals. The U.S., after all, is a nation built on optimism, and the musical, its foremost contribution to the world theater, has typically been seen as a straightforward comic romance that sends audiences out grinning and humming. But in an intensely imaginative 13-show career, Stephen Sondheim has embraced all those unpromising themes. From his big-time debut in 1957 as the lyricist of West Side Story to his 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George, a fantasy about the creation of a French impressionist painting...
...story of how this unlikely pair happens to be knocking at the door of the nuclear club, and what happens when the U.S. Government learns that two teenagers are making all that racket out there, has a gently realistic comic side. But it is also one of the most intelligent and gripping thrillers of recent years, a picture that transcends its WarGames genre (mainly because it avoids overt preaching and embraces humor) to set its own terms of endearment...
Harry Flashman, a flamboyant but minor villain in Thomas Hughes' 19th century novel Tom Brown's School Days, moved to center stage in George MacDonald Fraser's comic-historical novels of imperial adventure. Previous volumes placed Flashman, now a mature, hard-drinking rogue, in and around the Crimean War, the African slave trade and the American gold rush. With great panache he became involved with figures ranging from Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln to Queen Victoria and Lola Montez...
...sarcasm, mimicry, hyperbole, irony, parables, analogies and allusions. He poses questions and answers them, sets up philosophical straw men and knocks them down. He begins slowly and gains momentum; he races up the hill of one sentence and coasts down another. His timing is that of a stand-up comic. His voice can be as soothing as a late-night disk jockey's or as rumbling as an Old Testament prophet's. He can, on occasion, be shrill, edging toward the sanctimonious. But always one hears a man who is actually thinking while he speaks...