Word: comically
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...this sounds like the hyperbole of extreme disappointment, of bitter frustration at the fall of a modern comic idol, it is. Stardust Memories may be funnier than one cares to admit but Allen's eighth film is certainly no comedy. It's not a tragedy either, or even a strangled drama like Interiors. It smells most like a farce, a self-pitying self-satire. It is so contemptuously intellectual that the jokes about intellectuals are not funny but ironic. "Intellectuals are like the Mafia: they only kill their own," Allen snaps, acknowledging his brand of artistic suicide. Allen was once...
...course, it's asking a lot of anybody--even one of America's leading humor columnists--to be amusing every minute of the day. And, to be fair, Buchwald can be uproariously funny when he wants to be. It's almost as though he can turn his comic talents on and off the way he does his omnipresent tape recorder--which he uses to capture everything he says so that later he can incorporate a humorous off-the-cuff remark into a future column...
Buchwald said he tries to avoid writing too many of his columns on the campaign not only because people aren't that interested, but also because the candidates simply don't have much potential for humor. The ideal candidate--and president--for comic exploitation was Richard Nixon, Buchwald recalled wistfully. "He was my favorite, my Camelot," he sighed, eyes misting over. Reminiscing about the days of Watergate, Buchwald said, "Everbody was lying. It was a running story. It ran for over a year. It was just beautiful--you didn't have to make anything...
...Wahington-based humorist thinks the comic value of his work rises and falls to some extent with the material he's satirizing. "If the people are up on something and they're interested in it, then the humor of it works. If they're not interested, then the humor doesn't work," Buchwald explained. "It's like Johnny Carson--he'll tell a joke, and if the people don't know what he's talking about, it just lies there flat. And then he'll mention something about Billy Carter or something and he'll get applause. So when...
...film's comic tone, however, is as deadpan as that of a New Yorker profile. The interested-disinterested camera follows its subject for a few days, records snippets of conversation, refuses to strain for socko punch lines or an apocalyptic climax. As an ironic True Confessions, the film may satisfy the benign curiosity millions of people seem to have about Woody Allen. The star of cover stories in virtually every major magazine has now written and directed his own. It is the story of his life and his films, a defense of a public artist's need...