Word: comically
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...comic made a comeback from nowhere...
...stimulated the purchase of executive security equipment. FBI Director Philip Webster and other security specialists believe that as the U.S. recession deepens, disgruntled employees, psychopaths or terrorists will increasingly threaten industry leaders. Corporate security has now become a $7 billion to $10 billion business, and even the aging comic-strip crime fighter Dick Tracy last week was faced with the kidnaping of his old pal Millionaire Entrepreneur Diet Smith...
...hero needs more than fruit. Ted Peachum is a budding aesthete and furniture mover in Pocock, Ill. He is also a parody of that familiar species, the small-town boy with big ideas and an ambition to rise above his station. Who can blame him? His father rereads comic books and hibernates like a bear, his aunt is known chiefly for canceling subscriptions and returning unused portions, and his grandfather contracted a venereal disease at a health...
...rejected idealist is thus readied for the fleshy pleasures, and the stage is set for one of the author's most durable themes: libertinism and its comic consequences. Columbine matures as a perennial nymph, but she pales beside Snooky von Sickle, the brewery heiress of Wagnerian dimensions with whom Peachum shares many a back seat and shadowy glade. Yet love has its mysteries: when Peachum recalls having made unkind comments about Columbine's "doorbells," he feels a pang of remorse that is followed immediately by a twinge of desire. Peachum's entanglements are due to varying intentions...
Again, in the classic movie manner, the characters are drawn from different backgrounds. But instead of using these conflicts for comic relief or color, Fuller mutes them to emphasize the commonality of their response to shared danger. The only fully developed figure is the wise and weary sergeant, who is so resonantly underplayed by Marvin that one scarcely notices that the young men who group themselves self-protectively around him are not more sharply particularized. But that comes to seem a prime virtue, for character is something that is formed by experience digested, and there is no time for that...