Word: comically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...comics have jettisoned the topical satire of the '60s for a less political, more radical examination of the comic's relation to the society he entertains. The traditional comedian kept searching for the definitive belly laugh; the new humorist looks at the jokes, and the pursuit of them, with the icy disinterest of a social critic. As the subject of modern art is art, so the subject of the new comedy is comedy-the good, the bad, the unintentionally ugly. Call it the Post-Funny School of Comedy...
What began as a defiant form of anti-shtik has become a dominant mode in the funny-peculiar '80s. It is saturating the big screen with the films of Albert Brooks (the mime), Steve Martin (funny balloon animals), Murray Langston (the paper-bagged Unknown Comic), Martin Mull (the Fernwood 2-Night talk-show host), Andy Kaufman (heterosexual wrestling), Lily Tomlin (Wayne Newton) and the now-ready-for-prime-time cutups of NBC's Saturday Night Live. It took over TV years ago-in 1975, when S.N.L. hit the air and became a focal point for the new comedy...
...object of this vengeance: mainstream entertainers, or the comic's audience? With Andy Kaufman it can be hard to tell. Six years ago, he showed up on the first Saturday Night Live, smiled innocently at the audience and, phonograph to one side, mimed a single line from the chorus of a Mighty Mouse song. Is it funny...
...Tonight Show Albert Brooks, putting bozo entertainers through a Cuisinart of irony; he is Albert Brooks dicing and slicing the comedy commodity named "Albert Brooks" - an earnest obsessive just this side of obnoxious. By comparison Woody Allen plays it safe: despite the misogyny and paranoid fatalism, his comic persona is essentially lovable. Brooks plays hardball, with himself as the wall. On S.N.L. he played a comedian preparing to perform heart surgery on a patient who has answered his want ad. In Real Life he is a comedian who makes a documentary film about an American family and destroys them...
...Portnoy's Complaint, the conclusion of Zuckerman Unbound suggests a new beginning. Nathan even shows his impatience when he says, "Being a poor misunderstood millionaire is not really a topic that intelligent people can discuss for very long." As a sturdy vehicle for Roth's comic genius, Zuckerman may show up again: Will he travel to Prague and discover Franz Kafka as an aged steam-bath attendant? Will he beget children who grow up to be literary critics? Will he win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and have to return it when everything in the book is discovered...