Word: deadpan
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...closest students, almost Chinese in his mysteriousness. Superficially, few scars show. In one of his annual lectures in History 1711, "The United States and East Asia," he has recited the series of questions members of McCarran's committee once fired at him with a characteristically Fairbankian sense of deadpan humor. But, as few who know him at all can fail to mention, Fairbank often compresses some of his most serious observations into what Thomson has called his "inscrutable wit." On the doorjamb of his wonderfully book-laden study in Widener, for instance, Fairbank has scrawled four words that are almost...
...after four years without a record release, Iggy has turned toward greater musical sophistication and less emphasis on his once-anarchistic style. Collaborating with David Bowie (a close friend whom he accompanied on Bowie's 1975 American tour), Iggy has produced The Idiot, an album that blends the monotonic deadpan style of punk rock with electronic innovation. The same persona haunts this recording--an alienated soul tormented by nightmares and melancholy, ears buzzing with the constant drone of sameness--but the addition of Bowie as the chief composer gives this desolate voice a richer resonance...
...least Lindsay-Hogg can avoid doing penance for his selection of the cast; it's an all-star line-up. Jackson perfects a controlled deadpan; she achieves the Nixon scowl without the jowl. As a John Dean-like scapegoat, Sandy Dennis physically resembles a cross between the bespectacled Dean and a chipmunk in desperate need of orthodontic work. Mentally, she comes closer to a rodent in a behaviorist experiment as she blindly obeys Jackson's commands. Dennis impersonates Dean's monotone well, but her lines lack the variety to make her part interesting rather than grating...
Glenda Jackson holds her sometimes blatant screen presence in check and plays her devious role just right -that is, absolutely straight. Her haughty deadpan shades imperceptibly into sanctity or into sanctimony as her plotting requires. Sandy Dennis has some moments of dimwit charm as a John Dean-like scapegoat who has none of Dean's shrewdness, or anybody else's either. But a running gag in which a globetrotting diplomatic nun (Melina Mercouri) periodically uses her briefcase radio-phone to coach Jackson in Kissingeresque Realpolitik falls rather flat. And the Gerald Ford figure is a football-playing...
Costumed in a pinstripe three-piece suit, Naylor is deadpan. His expoundings vary less in expression than in dynamics. I was confused with what might be a masterly stroke: this Everysoul looks like and speaks with the authority of those stereotyped but elegant men in serious, insurance and aspirin, television commercials. I kept wondering if it was apt to have this television bombardment say to us--you are "condemned to remain within yourself." Perhaps...