Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...presidential visit to the Vatican in 1970 led to one of those scenes that are comic in retrospect but mortifying when experienced. Our advancemen had conceived the extraordinary idea that the President should leave for the Sixth Fleet from St. Peter's Square in a U.S. helicopter. The Curia, feeling that this represented enough martial trappings for one day, suggested that Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird not be included in the audience that the Holy Father would offer. However, as the official party was moving into the papal chamber for the general audience, Laird, a politician of considerable ingenuity...
...effect in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard now offers playgoers the flippest of flip sides. In Dogg's Hamlet, the first of two interrelated playlets, Stoppard telescopes tag lines and famous scenes to distill the doings of the broody Dane into a dizzying quarter-hour of comic relief. Then he caps it off with an even dizzier reprise, a 204-word two-minute version. In the larger version, Hamlet gets as far as "To be, or not to be . . ." when Ophelia pipes up "My lord," only to be scaldingly dismissed with "Get thee to a nunnery...
...Wodehouse's absurd caricatures always made sense in their own addle-pated terms, and underlying each of the master's farces was the coherent comic statement that blithering idiocy was the finest bulwark of the Empire. Donleavy's figures are too slackly drawn to be believable as caricatures and the only statement made by the novel is not comic but forlorn: the author has nothing to say. He seems to have few thoughts about the theater and none about London, or about an aristocracy that refuses to notice that it has been extinct since...
...exaggerated expressions, McCue mugs like an eight-year old who wants a new tricycle; Shohet evokes Ethel Merman; Barton, the ham-handed piano player, thinks it's enough to bellow in a smug voice and grin idiotically like George Burns, jutting his prognathous jaw like a salient into the Comic Void...
...recognizing tea on the menu of "that Scottish place" MacDonald's, his visionary inventor is quite appealing. He perpetually exhibits what Amy calls a "little-boy-lost look", aided by his slight figure that contrasts nicely with Warner's hulking frame. As the heroine, Mary Steenburgen balances the comic and the earnest aspects of her character well, making a consistent personality out of Amy's alternate bouts of flightiness and feminism...