Word: humor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...role of Bill Snibson, the Cockney peer, was originally a star turn for Lupino Lane, a comic mime of the '30s. Lindsay, seen in the U.S. as Edmund in Laurence Olivier's TV King Lear, proves an inspired successor. He has mastered the stereotypical Cockney's accusatory inflections, rough humor, feral grace and odd parlor tricks, from a no-hands bobbing of his hat on his head to incessant, playful swiping of a bystander's gold watch. He brings vitality to such shopworn comedy as passing out, being revived and protesting, "Here! I didn't faint for water...
...each other is wholly intertwined in their shared devotion to his work -- the spare, meticulous, compassionate vision that has made Wyeth both a beloved icon to American museumgoers and a nettlesome anachronism to the art establishment. So the Wyeths are girded to ride out, with grace and tweaking good humor, the storm of publicity that broke around them last week, created by a score of press releases sent out to advertise a scoop in Art & Antiques magazine...
...surprising that a writer tempted to kill off her moneymaking detectives resists repeating herself. The New Girl Friend, a volume of short stories published earlier this year, displayed a dry, macabre humor. Live Flesh is an intimately detailed working-class character study. And A DarkAdapted Eye is a contemporary version of the sprawling Edwardian family tale and a minor classic. Its central theme is the nature of how to tell a story. It begins, and begins again and again -- each time more ripely. Its searching in direction after direction, its inclusion of swatches of pseudojournalism, its final metaphysical ruminations...
...that many kids will want to buy this duck. The movie is too scuzzy to beguile children, too infantile to appeal to adults. Its humor is sub-Mad: Howard (played by Actor Ed Gale, and some other small people, in a duck suit, with Chip Zien providing the voice) is a master of "quack fu" who reads Rolling Egg and DQ magazines. He grows angry: "No more Mr. Nice Duck." He waxes philosophic: "No duck is an island." When the filmmakers grow tired of fowl puns -- about an hour after the audience does -- they switch to space opera, and Howard...
...committee, meanwhile, began hearings on Judge Antonin Scalia's nomination to Rehnquist's seat on the Supreme Court. Unlike Rehnquist, Scalia, 50, attempted to charm his questioners with good humor. But the Senators were less than delighted. After he repeatedly sidestepped questions on abortion, freedom of information, affirmative action and equal protection, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden interjected, "Who are you, Judge Scalia? Let yourself go, because it's been pretty boring thus far." Scalia refused to take up the challenge. "I have no agenda," he said...