Word: comically
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Having "pared down two years of material to 10 minutes" for her audition at Gutman Library, Michaels, a non-resident tutor and professional comic, will perform a stand-up routine of topical and political material...
...most of his previous works, Neil Simon has parried the perils of heart-to-heart emotional commitment with a disarming quip. A loose upper lip has been his tactic for keeping pain in quarantine. With an ironclad consistency, he has been the Man in the Comic Mask...
...endearing aspect of Brighton Beach Memoirs is that the mask has slipped a little. Without slighting his potent comic gifts, Simon looks back, not in anger, remorse or undue guilt but with fondly nourished compassion, at himself as an adolescent in 1937 and at the almost asphyxiatingly close-knit family around him. While the play housed at Broadway's Alvin Theater does not fully attain the playwright's highest aims, it does give off compelling glints of an urban Morning's at Seven, a ghetto Our Town and a wryly caustic Ah, Wilderness! Like them, Brighton Beach...
...production shortchanges some of the most famous scenes of Mother Courage--"The Song of Capitulation," "Solomon's Song"--but it does have its moments. Peter Becker's "Son of the Hours" is splendid, as are some of the comic interludes. And Mother Courage makes far better use of that enormous Mainstage space than did Agamemnon and some of the other undergraduate disasters of years past...
...what has made any of the Python or Python-offshoot products bad or good. Nor, despite considerable hinting from several quarters, does he agree that Python humor has evolved in any particular way since its creators started dabbling in the commercial feature-film world. For him the most important comic influence remains the English tradition springing from the likes of Tristram Shandy, and after that the "goon shows" of early radio and the comic compilation Beyond the Fringe...