Word: antically
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...WORLD'S GREATEST ATHLETE. In Carl Reiner's antic Where's Poppa? (1970), a football coach from a large Southern university admitted to recruiting his teams by kidnaping nine-year-olds and training them mercilessly until they came of competition age. One longs for the inspired insanity of such a notion during this slack and dreary comedy from Walt Disney studios. The idea here is that the coach of a smalltown college (John Amos) and his cretinous assistant (Tim Conway) stumble on a kind of peroxide Tarzan (Jan-Michael Vincent) and import him from Africa to bring...
...first half of this satirical revue consists of topical skits done in the style of old vaudeville, neobur-lesque, superior college humor, and the antic, abrasive tradition of Lenny Bruce. Many one-liners flick at their subjects with rapid deflationary humor: "In times of stress, remember the Pueblo." A drug raid is announced: dauntless police have just "seized two ounces of marijuana with a street value...
...WHAT REALLY makes Fogarty, and consequently the novel is the writing. Perfectly pitched to the man it describes, it matches his every antic with page after page of verbal histrionics. One imagines writing with a harmonica in his mouth and a ball horn plugged into his typewriter. The novel bounces, gyrates and bucks like another coaster car along the precarious edge of the reader's tolerance, never quite falling off. For whenever the author leans too far in the direction of obscenity-which is frequently--he bounces right back with a metaphor or reference to feed any appetite Jackie Kennedy...
...other actors help a great deal. Jeannie Berlin, May's daughter, is adept at playing the same sort of antic stupidity as May and making it not only recognizable but also winning. Eddie Albert is spectacular, a figure to strike terror into any suitor's heart; his character is a combination of George Babbitt and Eric...
Stoppard pushes this and related theses with antic wordplay, inspired zaniness and crackerjack wit. The evening would sag in spots if it were not for Hordern. What might have been simply a caricature of an absent-minded professor emerges as a warmly affectionate portrait of the last living humanist. And Rigg is lovely to look at, especially in the nude, and to listen to as she delivers her lines with a resolute intelligence that seems to unbend the pretzel twists of thought...