Word: comically
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Last night neither was working as the hoopsters dropped their third Ivy League contest in as many tries to a mediocre Yale squad, 57-49, as the scoreboard added the comic relief...
Tasty Meadows is the setting of Lily Tomlin's latest vehicle The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a movie which, at its outset, promises to be a wicked satire of the TV age, filled with subtle humor, razor-sharp ridicule of American pop culture, and ingenious manipulation of every tiny comic detail of insipid domestic life. Unfortunately, Shrinking Woman--in its last half hour--reneges on its tacit deal with the audience, degenerating from incisive social satire to the silly comedy-adventure shenanigans of a Gene Wilder--Richard Pryor movie. Director Joel Schumacher and scriptwriter Jane Wagner let the film slowly slide...
Lily Tomlin aspires to Chaplinesque heights of comic intuition and craftsmanship. As a movie performer. Tomlin has every other American comedian beat--the nebbishness of Woody Allen, the manic antics of Mel Brooks, and the shrill flightiness of Goldie Hawn cannot come close. Such comics lack Tomlin's mastery of the subtle comic flourish, the slight gesture or tiny twitch that not only reveals character but grabs the Big Laugh as well...
...Tomlin's party from the first frame to the last. She delivers several abysmally stupid lines with such true conviction that you're forced to, at least, let out a light chuckle. If only Shrinking Woman could have maintained the comic intelligence that Tomlin displays, it could have been a much needed clever satire. But instead, it lacks the courage to fulfill its initial convictions. Schumacher and Wagner would have been better off leaving clever Simians to Tarzan and Clint Eastwood...
...rake of renown, Plume stirs the love of Silvia (Laurie Kennedy), who disguises herself in male uniform and eventually hooks him. Plume's best friend, Mr. Worthy (Frank Maraden), is led a mad matrimonial chase by a haughty heiress named Melinda, played in an impish comic vein by Laura Esterman. Bumpkins, worldlings, gulls and wits populate the evening. Toward the end of the play, it becomes evident that Plume is not a womanizing gourmand, as he pretends to the world, but a moonstruck child of sentiment who has found in the chaste but frolicsome Silvia his true heart...