Word: comical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...recent comedy Parents, a kind of robin's-egg Blue Velvet, limned a '50s family, as placid and telegenic as the Andersons on Father Knows Best, that devours human flesh. Now Middle America gets a return visit from Joe Dante, guerrilla terrorist in Spielbergian suburbia. His Gremlins was a comic nightmare in which midget monsters invade a wonderful-life town and act up like the Hell's Angels in a malt shop. In The 'Burbs, the gremlins are the townspeople themselves, driven to posse paranoia by their suspicions about people whose only sin may be eccentricity. It's sort...
...absurdist nightmare, a story that all but defied the Western imagination. A middle-aged author, born in Bombay but for many years resident in London, writes a long, sardonic novel, by turns philosophical and comic and fantastic. In the book's opening scene, two middle-aged Indian actors fall 29,002 feet from a jetliner that has just been exploded by terrorists over the English Channel. They have an animated conversation as they hurtle toward earth; they land safely, but then their troubles begin anew. Along the way, the author writes about his schooling and young adulthood in Britain, about...
...book reads well, despite annoying parenthetical injections of "comic" editorial opinion. These appear only in the first few chapters--evidently the author later realizes he can incorporate them into the body of the text. But the story lacks the creativity of the original novels: Only dedicated fans will maintain an interest...
...SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie (Viking; $19.95). Charges of blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad have put Rushdie's book into international headlines. But there is no harm, only relentless artistry, in this encyclopedic fiction about the explosive, often comic meetings of East and West...
...President's a-little-something-for-everyone approach to Government, lurching from new national parklands to a statehood referendum for Puerto Rico, at times sounded as if it had been borrowed from Lyndon Johnson. But . often the mismatch between promises and price tags bordered on the comic. Bush took pains to recall that he had promised to be "the Education President," and invited his audience to join the crusade by enlisting as "the Education Congress." Yet the up-front cost of the President's innovative proposals comes to a paltry $58 million, less than $1.50 for every child...