Word: gaggingly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nearly eight feet tall and looked like a cast-iron coffin. At first, I thought it was somebody's grotesque idea of a joke - a gag gift, perhaps, for Uday Hussein, Saddam's psychopath son and head of Iraqi's sports administration. But when I opened it, I realized its purpose was deadly serious...
...That Max Smart is played by the admirable Steve Carell, who is desperately looking for deadpan jokes in all the wrong places, is beside the point. So, too, is that his sidekick is played by the lissome Anne Hathaway, who also seems willing to go along with a gag if only she could find one. Or that their nerdy colleagues in CONTROL have a few attenuated comical moments in their fight to save the free world from KAOS. They are all strapped to a hurtling plot line that is heading from one fireball to the next, with only...
...disarms the movie's constant flirtations with bad taste. For example, The Zohan gets a job in a rundown beauty parlor and rises from sweeping up the floor to creating sweeping hair-dos - and incidentally to providing sexual services for its aging clientele. It's a variation on a gag that happily served Mel Brooks in The Producers, and as in that enterprise, the result is more innocent merriment than discomfort for the audience. But still...issues keep arising...
...comedy shows provide the ironic lens through which we view everything that happens in the public arena. And that no candidate for high office can hope to be taken seriously unless they're willing to stop being serious and take part in the japery. But now that the most gag-filled primary season in history is lumbering to an end, I have a modest proposal: Cut it out! The comedy campaign has gone from novelty to inanity, damaging not just the great tradition of renegade political satire, but whatever shaky credibility is left in our political process...
Similarly, Jon Stewart rolls out a daily parade of video clips and responds to them, not with gag lines, but with an arched eyebrow, an expression of mock befuddlement, or mock-angry outburst dripping with sarcasm. Colbert's nightly impersonation of a pompous rightwing pundit, too, is one long wink to the audience - we're all hip to the put-on. David Letterman's Great Moments in Presidential Speeches - maybe the quintessential political satire of the Bush era - don't even need any reaction from the host; the absurdity is there...