Word: comical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...basically did nothing but stand at a microphone and tell jokes. He was a wiseguy, a smart aleck, a comic minimalist in pursuit of the perfect gag, which, through a process of trial and error and full of genially sneering asides at the eggs he laid along the way, he often found...
...Hope, who died last week at 100, was something else too: the voice of 20th century America at midpassage, the spokesman of our heedless, surface-skimming spirit, the comic for the age of the production line, churning out interchangeable, immediately disposable jokes at an industrial pace. His comic persona was primitive. He was a wolf, constantly leering at pretty women, constantly rejected by them (until the last reel). He was a coward, hiding his ignobility under instantly collapsible braggadocio...
...That would be, of all unlikely people, Woody Allen, ever voluble in his admiration for Hope. "It's just shameless how I steal from him," he said recently. "I don't mean the contents of his jokes--but I do him, I lean on him." He means Hope's comic character--especially, in Allen's early films, his sexual ineptitude and the endless spray of one-liners. What Hope uniquely had was brashness, the ability to tweak the mighty (and their supporting ninnies) and skip away unscathed...
There was no depth to Hope. But he made up for that with his tireless brio, his total lack of sentimentality--and his ability to stay on top of the news. He famously mastered every comic venue his 20th century offered--vaudeville, Broadway, radio, movies, television--and even in his early days he did topical jokes, designed to be tossed aside and replaced by others on tomorrow's hot topic. This was in contrast to his peers, whose endlessly polished routines had to endure unchanging over the long years they toured the circuit. That skill made Hope the perfect comedian...
...Persepolis conveys both the horror of the regime and the comic absurdity of living under it. In one panel young Marjane's mother warns her, "If anybody asks what you do during the day, say you pray." In the next panel, Marjane and her friends compete to see who prays the most. "Five times," says one boy. "Eleven," fibs Marjane. The kids also boast about whose family has suffered most. Those whose parents have the grimmest prison tales gain their friends' admiration; those with the most relatives killed in the Iran-Iraq war get better marks at school. Satrapi...