Word: comically
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Zonker Harris, tanner extraordinaire in the comic strip Doonesbury, had the right idea, just an outdated approach. To prepare for big tanning competitions like the George Hamilton Cocoa Butter Open, Zonker would spend hours under the sun with an old-fashioned reflector. Today, seekers of the perfect tan have an easier time of it: they simply drop by the neighborhood tanning salon, cozy up to a bank of ultraviolet lamps and emerge looking as if they have just returned from Hawaii. "The ordinary person who can't afford a vacation can get a lasting tan for a fraction...
...third novel, as in his 16 plays, Gurney remains a mordantly comic eulogist whose strengths are mood, milieu and character. The title refers to a black-tie dance, the grandest event on the social calendar back when there was a Society. The privileged crowd thinned out in the '60s, when the young singles and couples moved on to other cities or, more likely, the suburbs, to alcohol or to the angry consciousness of the Viet Nam epoch. Two decades later, a couple of nostalgic veterans of the deb-party circuit decide to revive the Snow Ball. Cooper Jones...
Some actors--Robert De Niro, for example--pour themselves into a character and are all but unrecognizable from one film to another. Others, usually actors from the past like Gary Cooper or Cary Grant, pour the role into themselves. Grant could be a stumble-footed comic in pictures like Bringing Up Baby and Arsenic and Old Lace or an urbane romantic hero in To Catch a Thief or North by Northwest, but no one would ever have mistaken him for anyone but Cary Grant...
Apart from all its banality, Mass Appeal is a curious film: curiously irreligious for a film which professes to be about religion, albeit mass-produced And more offensively, strangely self-important for a presumably comic film: centered around the burning question "Is there a place for ethics in the priesthood?" it provokes instead the query: "Is there a place for priests in Hollywood?" We wonder what may have been the roic of "technical advisor" Father Joseph Battaglia: maybe to show them...
Elmore Leonard gives this piece of business a nice wrinkle by delaying the punch line for eleven pages. Don't ask how; the ploy works like the rim shot of a drummer perking up a lounge comic's routine. Leonard may not be the tightest plotter on the popular thriller circuit, but he is the writer who pays closest attention to getting the tacky details right. Bribing a night clerk with a greasy cheese-steak sub is something that could happen only in the Philadelphia-South Jersey axis of ethnic indigestibles...