Word: gag
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...heedless exuberance in his playing. He's happy to play dumb - allowing Dewey to live profitably within the unexamined premises, the mythic fatuity, of his media-driven myth. Like the other films Apatow has been involved with, Walk Hard is a clever blend of very broad, occasionally raunchy gag-smithing and an unspoken, yet palpable, social shrewdness. For the moment, at least, this guy is somehow plugged into our half-formed, half-subversive thoughts. Walk Hard is actually talking about - well, all right, goofily alluding to - serious issues, though its creators would, I suspect, rather die than admit that...
...look was reassuringly ordinary: a smiling, Waspy face under a helmet of graying hair. But what he did onstage was unsettling. His act was in part that of an entertainer at a kid's birthday party--juggling, fashioning balloon animals, wearing a gag arrow through his head--but the whole thing was set within ironic quotation marks. It was stupid-smart: a clever man playing someone with misplaced self-confidence who didn't realize he was a buffoon. This guerrilla comic in a three-piece suit was daring the crowd to get it. And for a long time, there were...
...gag order itself became the story instead. Now British news media are focusing on the details they are permitted to reveal, such as the identities of the two men arrested. Their names were revealed in a number of outlets on Oct. 29. Ian Strachan, aged 30, was described by the mass market daily, The Mirror, as "a Scots-born businessman" and by its larger rival, The Sun, as a "socialite smoothie." The other was identified as Sean McGuigan, aged 40, said to be Irish and, according to his neighbor quoted in the Evening Standard, "rough...
...Strachan and McGuigan are due to appear in court on Dec. 20. The gag order obtained by the CPS is not time-limited and could, in theory, continue to restrict reporting of the case in the U.K. through to its conclusion. According to a story in The Sun of Oct. 30, the royal at the center of the case "is on the brink of going public." A Buckingham Palace source quoted in the paper expressed concerns about the wider damage to the reputation of the royal family and added "the secrecy surrounding the case is simply fuelling it into something...
...Nowadays it's much tougher to keep a lid on a juicy story as these events testify. Razi Mireskandari, a partner at the law firm Simons Muirhead & Burton and a specialist in media law, says he can imagine a scenario in which a gag order might become untenable because websites, wherever they are based, "are becoming freely accessible by nearly everybody. There could be an issue of trying to put your thumb in the dam, but it hasn't quite got to that stage yet." In the case of the anonymous royal embroiled in the alleged blackmail plot...