Word: gagged
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...background or typical TV moralizing gives At Mother's Request its tabloid appeal. Quite simply, these people are too crazy to learn anything from. Frances is not merely an overdemanding mother but a near psychotic whose fevered outbursts ("How dare you mention Las Vegas in this house!") would be gag lines in any other TV show. Her "good" son Marc is fixated on movie cameras and tape recorders; Larry is convinced that nuclear war will break out before his college finals. The relationship between mother and sons has a creepy Oedipal ambiguity. Says Frances to Marc, ominously, as her murder...
...liking this adaptation of the Off-Broadway musical hit -- it has no polish and a pushy way with a gag -- but the movie sneaks up on you, about as subtly as Audrey II. The songs are neat pastiches of '60s pop. The plant is an animatronic wonder, all blue gums, naughty tendrils and mighty mouth. Moranis and Greene make for a comely-homely pair of thwarted lovers, and Martin is his hilarious self, libeling all dentists who had just managed to forget Marathon Man. Then Bill Murray shows up as the perfect dental patient, sublime masochist to Martin's cheerful...
...wisecracking child, irreverent senior citizen or cute extraterrestrial. "Let's just say we're not a high-impact comedy like Laverne and Shirley," says Newhart, 57. "We give the audience credit for having some intelligence." Newhart's leisurely, low- voltage style sets the tone; instead of rapid-fire gag lines, he opts for shrewdly timed pauses, stammers and deadpan understatement. He gets his best laughs not so much by acting as by reacting. Says David Mirkin, who produces the show with Douglas Wyman: "Bob is the best 'oh' man in the business...
That much oatmeal between glossy red-white-and-blue covers made the party's surviving left wing gag. Observed Ann Lewis, director of the Americans for Democratic Action: "It was not the stuff that energizes voters." Pointing out that Democratic primary voters this year have recoiled from centrist candidates, she added, "Every primary in which there was a clear choice between a real Democrat and an imitation, they chose the genuine article." If "real Democrat" is defined as liberal, the returns in several key contests bear her out. In Georgia, for example, Hamilton Jordan ran on a platform of moving...
...consensus at the symposium: self-deprecating humor is a President's best friend and weapon. "The chance to be seen as a warm, relaxed human being with a twinkle-in-the-eye approach to himself is just too good an opportunity to miss," said Bob Orben, a leading gag writer and author of many of Ford's best lines. "Humor reaches out, puts a warm, affectionate arm around an audience and says, 'I am one of you. I understand you.' If you can laugh together, you can vote together...