Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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TREMORS. Kevin Bacon fights off an attack of 30-ft.-long earthworms in this crowd-pleasing sci-fi flick. Shrewdly written, energetically directed and played with high comic conviction, Tremors is bound to become a cult classic...
With justification. Burnham, a veteran investigative reporter and author (The Rise of the Computer State), suggests that the IRS frequently uses its extraordinary powers of coercion in a presumptuous and reckless manner. He illustrates the charge with numerous cases, a few obviously selected for comic relief: the New York teenager, for example, who questioned the constitutionality of the income tax in a letter published in the Buffalo Courier-Express. Suspecting criminal noncompliance, 15 agents tailed the boy for four days, discovering that he talked to his mailman, ate pizza and read pornographic magazines. True, he never filed a tax form...
...Cold War is over, and we won," proclaimed the Doonesbury comic strip. Countless op-ed columns and political speeches rely upon the same assumption: capitalism has triumphed, and Eastern Europe is about to become the next outpost of Reaganstyle laissez-faire...
Something about telephones is obscurely comic, related to some manic vaudeville. In your fist you clutch to the ear an object that looks ignominiously like the shining plastic cousin of a shoe. Designers have produced more streamlined models, but an essential ungainliness is inescapable. It results partly from the pressing of technology against anatomy. The technosmooth circuitry is pushed bizarrely against the old Darwinian skull. The talker's being comes unfocused from the visual immediate room and refocuses -- through the ear! -- elsewhere. The Here communes with There through sudden activations of breath, vocal cords, jawbone, tongue, lips, eyes, emotions. Through...
...black American people -- to argue against the notion that art is color-blind. Most American painters, in McElroy's view, put racial stereotypes in their work. These were usually negative. "Prosperous collectors created a demand for depictions that fulfilled their own ideas of blacks as grotesque buffoons, servile menials, comic entertainers, or threatening subhumans," McElroy writes in the catalog. "This vicious cycle of supply and demand sustained images that denied the inherent humanity of black people by reinforcing their limited role in American society...