Word: comically
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...results of Haig's shuttle diplomacy, circa 1982. In a situation where the adversaries are both trying to save face, he can hopefully negotiate an ego-soothing out for each side. This would be a fitting happy-ever-after end to a crisis that at first seemed more comic opera than heavy drama. The Argentines hold the key to reaching this desirable resolution, for they can afford to be more flexible than the British. Certainly, the fleet won't return to Portsmouth without some kind of victory in pocket. The bottom line is that Britain cannot back down...
...what began that morning as a coup by young reformers turned into something that more resembled a comic opera. At 9 p.m., when the new leaders appeared on national television, it became painfully apparent that the young officers had no real plan for setting up a new government. Observed a foreign diplomat: "Unfortunately they came up with only half a plan-how to throw the rascals...
...Entebbe airport. Amin eats the flesh of an honest judge he has ordered killed. Perhaps Patel too lovingly details the baroque torture, and Joseph Olita's unsteady command of the acting craft often makes Amin seem too cuddly a cannibal. Still, the film serves as an effective comic-book primer on the most colorful mass murderer...
...relentlessly and with relish. For him-as for Lenny Bruce, the pioneer of Savonarola satire, and Pryor's only true antecedent-profanity serves to give both a salty rhythm to his sentences and a Joy Buzzer shock to his more refeened listeners. It remains for his fearless comic acuity to tell him precisely how much gutter imagery his audience can take. As box office returns show, more and more moviegoers are taking him in huge, healthy doses. Pryor has always been big with the hip and in Harlem. Now he knows his comedy can play in Peoria...
...fact, Pryor was playing in Peoria-on the streets of that central Illinois city-from the time he was born there in 1940. Like many other comedians, Richie was the little kid with the big sassy mouth in a tough neighborhood. Pryor has minted much comic revenue from images of his youth: the whorehouse his grandmother ran, his father's satyric appetite, his own early awakening to the pleasures of the flesh, the sniper fire of racism. Some of this currency is counterfeit (his family, as he says in Sunset Strip, was not poor), but all is dross...