Word: comicalities
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According to Crimson archives, Al Franken spent a lot of his time as a Harvard undergraduate involved in the campus theatrical scene. Among his achievements were launching a cabaret in Currier House and staging an original musical about Richard Nixon. Perhaps his greatest achievement was starring as comic Lenny Bruce in the play Lenny (later made into a movie by Bob Fosse). The Dunster House production of Lenny marked the play’s first amateur performance...
...irreverence that we’re all about ready to skip the cannoli and go home. Where sexual orientation, ethnic and family issues should be addressed seriously, another joke is made to relieve the tension. The idea of a gay Italian-French-Canadian has a lot of comic potential; in the end, unfortunately, the director is too overwhelmed to stop making jokes and tell what could have been a winning story...
Writer Mike White (The Good Girl), whose previous work has generally been audacious and edgy, consistently plays it safe in School of Rock, using Black as a cushion upon which to fall back in the least comically risky manner. Similarly, the past films of director Richard Linklater (Waking Life, Dazed and Confused) have hardly suggested a proficiency at producing inspirational mainstream comedies of this type. However, both White and Linklater prove adept at producing conventional material uncommonly well. School of Rock echoes with comic and emotional resonance without getting mired in sentimentality, allowing Black to revel in a role...
...extras, pouring water on each other, harassing the protagonists and telling audience members to be glad that life isn’t worse than it is. They are on stage for about half the play, and yet they have nothing to do with the it; their only function is comic relief. At best, they are superfluous and occasionally annoying, but when the action becomes serious, their incessant gaiety distracts from the relationship of the lovers, making the plight seem trivial and irrelevant...
...films of the year, American Splendor skillfully manipulates the medium of film in the same way last year’s Adaptation toyed with the basic structures of the screenplay. Splendor’s foundation is the life of chronically cantankerous graphic artist Harvey Pekar, whose series of autobiographic comic books in the ’70s and ’80s captured the innate complexities of a simple existence and ultimately revolutionized the comic book industry. These books had a number of different illustrators, and the varying styles are translated by directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini into...