Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...some cholesterol-free windbag hyperventilate about how his energy has doubled, his triglyceride level has dropped, his sexual performance is off the charts, and his life expectancy has approached that of a Galapagos tortoise, all because he has begun daily sessions on an exercise bicycle. Nothing stimulates the gag reflex so quickly as news photos of entire families-mom, dad and six children-jogging in identical warmup suits. And nothing is more appalling than, as a 10-to 15-mile-a-week runner (which is to say a moderate lunatic; some glittery-eyed types run 100 miles a week...
...duets on the way to the ale house, and Speed makes up for his raspy voice with quick foot work. Apparently, Speed's affinity for fruit is supposed to be comic, but all he ever does with the apples is eat them and the banana-rape is a tired gag...
...Gerald Ford figure; her role is amusing, but it fits poorly into the narrative. Playing Kissinger with a Greek accent, Melina Mercouri advises Jackson from abroad, using a portable phone to check on the abbess' progress. It is funny once or twice, but not as a running gag. Still, there are few problems with the acting save the occasional air of embarrassment from the nuns who deliver the poorest lines...
...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 nun (Anne Meara) who is always-guess what?-falling and bumping into things. That joke has long since...
Stanislaw Lem's stories are somewhat like the enormous gag that Edwin Land, the wealthy inventor of the camera that bears his name, pulled on Harvard when he tied his contribution for the Science Center to the stipulation that the structure look like his photographic brainchild. Lem is an absurd humorist whose jokes are too big to be funny. He writes of a world gone mad. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Futurological Congress are tales set in future societies that no longer know where they have come from or where they are going. Indeed, they no longer know...