Word: comically
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...film Pearlie, but for originality, Lithgow scoops him. In a story about families overly concerned with their own self-preservation, it is Roberta--the social pariah--who is the most consistent source of spirit when danger arises. Roberta also plays "Sir Scum"; she hurdles shrubbery with Garp in a comic pursuit of reckless drivers, outpacing and protecting her friend. In the eerie feminist funeral for Garp's slain mother, where the protagonist must attend in drag, Roberta runs interference for Garp when he is unmasked. Roberta's is the first shoulder upon which everyone cries...
...caught sight of each other and began to shoot. The pistols made phutt, phutt noises. I could see the paint pellets spin past me, although they were too fast to duck away from. My fourth or fifth shot hit the red player, who said "Aaaargh!"the way comic-book villains used to do when they got bopped by Captain Marvel, whom I now felt myself to resemble...
That was the key to the game's unexpected lightness of mood. This was an acted-out comic book, adult cops and robbers. It certainly did not carry the brutal symbolic weight of fantasized murder. When Hockmeyer, the Maine riverman, shot me as I was about to grab the red flag and glory, I said "Ooog, good shot" and immediately felt slow and stupid, not quick and clever. But that was the extent of it; I didn't feel dead...
Then of course there are Falstaff and his companions, whom Shakespeare put in the play not for comic relief but as a parallel to, and a commentary on, the main-history plot. In Shakespeare's lifetime, Falstaff was spoken of more than any other character, and the work circulated in a half dozen editions, always with a reference to the "humorous conceits" of Falstaff in the subtitle. Since then the role has been written about more than any other except Hamlet, and so tempting has it been for players that even women have acted the part professionally...
Falstaff is generally regarded the greatest comic figure in English literature, and more will agree with Orson Welles that it is "the best role that Shakespeare ever wrote" than will share Bernard Shaw's narrow view of the man as "a besotted and disgusting old wretch." We find in him features drawn from the miles gloriosus of ancient Roman comedy, from the stage Vice, Devil, Fool, and Lord of Misrule, from Rabelais and Heaven knows what else-all heightened through Shakespeare's astonishing inventiveness into something far greater than the sum of his parts...