Word: deadpan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wake of China honch Jiang Zemin's visit, people are beginning to realize that the wily/cherubic Jiang managed to go a whole week without saying anything at all. But at least no one tried to kill him ? a la the deadpan Airplane spawn The Naked Gun, which I mention here simply because it's really, really funny. It's Reggie...
Balancing a grave discussion of global warming with a playful deadpan wit, Vice President Al Gore '69 gave the inaugural address of the Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs on Friday afternoon in the ARCO Forum...
Since Kirby Dick's Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist displays all of its subject's creative carpentry skills, it is not for the faint of stomach. (When the song The Hammer of Love starts playing, go out for popcorn.) But like the 1994 Crumb, this deadpan documentary transcends its sensational topic. Flanagan's artful self-mutilation, and especially his corrosively comic descriptions of it, amounted to a heroic decision to take the punishment that God or nature meted out to him into his own hands...
...film--a deadpan comedy cloaked in noir atmosphere (fog, dark alleys, secret meetings)--does not merely point a gnarled finger at French gullibility; it gets at the universal impulse to create alternative truths. Lying is a way to stay alive. "When Death comes," says Albert, "we'll lie to it. We'll say, 'You've got the wrong guy.'" This anti-Hero leaves an indelible taste, somehow both bitter and savory...
ANTHONY T. ULASEWICZ, 54, a former New York City policeman who later served as a private investigator for the White House, was the perfect witness for warm-weather TV viewing. A Runyonesque character, he described with deadpan humor his difficulties in "getting rid of all those cookies"--distributing the $220,000 that [personal presidential attorney Herbert] Kalmbach channeled to him... [B]y prearrangement, he left packets of $100 bills in office-building lobbies or airport luggage lockers. He was obliged to make so many phone calls from public booths that he finally took to wearing a bus driver's coin...