Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...test induced constant nausea and what he calls "social phobia," a fear of performing in social situations. Things were only made worse by roommate Oswald, an anti-social computer programmer with a bad habit of urinating in a glass jar in various parts of the apartment. Oswald is both comic relief and a warning of what Marler could turn into; it's only a short path, he intimates, form his own awkwardness to his roommate's bizarre aggression...
Some adjustments were almost comic. Females quickly learned that their lingerie would be ruined in the ship's laundry, which has no gentle wash cycle. The mess-hall menu was geared to hungry young males, with few low-fat items. More bathrooms had to be allotted to women in the 333-m-long carrier so they wouldn't have to walk city blocks to find one. Male sailors received so many lectures about fraternization that at first they were afraid even to talk to females. "Everyone was on edge," says Bosun's Mate 1 Isaac Small...
CHRIS FARLEY has built a career on playing fat, loud, accident-prone losers. But NEWT GINGRICH wasn't insulted when the Saturday Night Live comic (and co-star of the new film Tommy Boy) turned up at a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee acting just like him. Farley first took a swipe at the Speaker's penchant for handing out reading lists, offering up one that included a children's book as well as novels by Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins. Imitating Gingrich's rapid-fire delivery, Farley then pushed through bills declaring all Democrats officially weird and moving...
...Knopf; 414 pages; $24) is something of a runaway hog itself, a 10,000-acre comic novel set in what might almost be called Animal Farm State...
...stylistic cartwheels all around the gym. She writes course-catalog entries, student-fiction papers and newspaper articles (even in Spanish). She masters billionaire talk, bovine-cloning monologues and the shrewd counsel of black elder sisters. In its easy virtuosity and wicked glee, Moo is rather like one of those comic novels in which John Updike gives himself a holiday from more draining work. And if Moo finally has more of a target than a point, it never allows us to forget that, in a certain context, no Smiley face is without its sadness...