Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Italian actor and a host of imitators swept a generation of European love interests into their arms -- the ladies' honor often preserved by eleventh- hour plot devices (in the case of The Sheik, Valentino's character was revealed to be an Englishman in Middle Eastern drag). More recently, crudely comic variations on this theme have had Western women fending off oversexed petrosheiks in films like Protocol (1984) and The Jewel of the Nile...
...Franz Kafka, one of the most serious and tragic authors of this century, at the same time a humorist?" I think that whoever does not laugh when reading his novels...does not understand them." Havel's 1984 play, "Largo Desolato: A Play in Seven Scenes," presents the comic and hauntingly Kafkaesque world of Professor Leopold, a philosopher who has gotten into "trouble" for expounding on "intellectual hooliganism" in a recent treatise...
Michael Moore, the director of the film documentary Roger & Me, is a hybrid of two Ralphs -- Kramden and Nader. The son of an autoworker, he has the persona of a bumbling working guy; he is blessed with brilliant comic timing, and his waistline is Gleasonesque. At the same time, Moore was once the editor of a left-wing magazine, and he considers himself an activist sniffing out the hypocrisies of corporate America. The comedian and the reformer lurk within Moore, and just as he did with Roger & Me, he winningly manages to express both these sides of himself...
...visions guaranteed to be accurate? Errors do occur, it is admitted. "What if a devil or a witch or an angry ancestor interferes with the divination process for its own purposes, maybe to mislead the client with a false message?" What if, indeed? The author's fizz of comic energy is as wild and scornful as Richard Condon's, back when Condon was young and frisky. And as was true with such daft Condon fables as Some Angry Angel, Dooling's story has no detectable point or purpose, except to marvel at the rich variety of human wickedness...
Even more interesting than the unfolding of the plot, though, is the interaction between Mump and Smoot and the way that they manage to create complex characters without the aid of intelligible language. Mump seems first merely to be the straight man to Smoot's comic. But Mump is also clearly the leader: arrogant, self-assured, and at times abusive to his sidekick. Smoot is the underdog the audience roots for--but he is also wily, vindictive, and--with the audience's help--even manages to one-up Mump a time or two. Both characters grapple with moral issues usually...