Word: comically
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...Carroll experimented with trick questions; in this century, J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit offered a few original puzzles: "A box without hinges, key or lid. Yet golden treasure inside is hid." Answer: An egg. The sport trickled down to Gotham City, home of Batman and Robin; in a recent comic-book adventure, the Riddler leaves a clue to the locale of his next crime: "When is a horse most like a stamp collection?" Answer: When it's a hobby horse (a reference to Hobby Airport in Houston...
Such a story could get tiresome, but Hughes handles the material with an appropriately light touch. His deft comic touches includes inserting clips from the "Twilight Zone" soundtrack during some of Samantha's more trying moments...
While Hughes usually succeeds in his comic effect, there are moments that amount to nothing more than bad taste. Examples include a young woman with a back brace who is constantly tripping or drenching her face in water fountains, and the Asian exchange student whose name--Long Duck Dong--alone should demonstrate the racist stereotyping of his character. Equally cardboard is Jake's beautiful but shallow girlfriend, who tells Jake: "I fantasize that I'm your wife and we're like the richest, most popular adults in town...
...nihilism of his era. He has never tried to hide the gloomy truths about modern life or gloss over all the sound reasons (starting or ending with Auschwitz) for a thinking person to despair. His most memorable characters (Herzog, Mr. Sammler, Henderson the Rain King) can list in sometimes comic detail all the symptoms of the decline of the West. Almost alone in serious contemporary fiction, though, Bellow's heroes think that a cure may be worth...
...answer to Marilyn Monroe; of cancer; in Windsor, England. Like Monroe, Dors had brains and talent, but was wasted in a spate of Hollywood clunkers (I Married a Woman) before being dropped by RKO. She retained Britons' affection, however, and even after ballooning to Wagnerian-soprano proportions played comic and character parts in theater...