Word: comically
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...this stage in his career, Steve Martin has a little problem too. In the '70s he was a stand-up-comic sensation. A dream of all-American vacuity with his careful coif, phosphorescent white jacket and conventionally handsome features, Martin came on like a silly Robert Redford, a would-be stud not quite as gorgeous or with it as he thought he was−but lots funnier. When Martin turned to feature films (with The Jerk in 1979), the challenge was to transfer the soul of this character, this smart dumb guy, into the svelte body of a comic...
ENGAGED. Gilda Radner, 38, loudmouthed, lantern-jawed comic actress on TV's Saturday Night Live, in films (First Family) and on Broadway (Lunch Hour); and Gene Wilder, 49, cherubic actor whom she met in 1981 on the set of Hanky Panky, where they fell in love both on-and offscreen (real life and reel life diverge in their latest movie together, The Woman in Red, in which he stars and directs and she co-stars as a spurned admirer); in Los Angeles. The marriage, her second, his third, is planned for October in Connecticut...
...must once have been unimaginably weird. True, the trappings of proletarian fiction are all roughly in place-lowlife taverns, brothels and urban rot: "The setting sun lit up the most revolting inner recesses of the sloping street." But the anti-hero who stumbles through this landscape is a perversely comic invention. Remo Erdosain collects bills for a sugar company and engages in petty embezzlement. He also writhes in noisy anguish at a world that can ignore his true genius. "Didn't they call me crazy," he asks an acquaintance, "because I said they should set up shops...
...occasionally seemed calculated to make viewers cry every few minutes, ABC has offered much more than pathos. It has persuasively conveyed the uncelebrated thrills of volleyball, the perils of equestrian cross-country, the arcane strategy of cycling, along with the explosive power of swimming and track. By recording the comic pratfalls of riders and weight lifters, the poignant stumbles of pentathlon runners in the home stretch, it has shown that sports are not as easy as the best athletes make them look. With the utter clarity of its new technique, super-slow-motion, it may revolutionize coverage of some swift...
...Honey, Michael Frayn's free adaptation of a play Chekhov wrote when he was still a student, strikes vital sparks, and this because Frayn treats the text as an organism that can flower with care and pruning. At 21, Chekhov was already halfway toward being "Chekhovian"; he alternated comic and pathetic moods instead of blending the two into a sonorous melancholy for the class of landed Russians who would fall before the Revolution...