Word: humorlessly
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...analyze them--the bewailings of the falling-off of the cartoon market after the demise of the Saturday Evening Post, the endless discussions over drawing versus captions, even, God forbid, analytical tracings of artistic styles--they all glut the air and remove these cartoons into some sort of exalted humorless nether-region. The Saturday Evening Post had lousy cartoons (e.g. Hazel); drawings and captions balance each other out just fine; and no, I don't think Charles Addams is indebted to Salvador Dali...
Surprisingly, the activists were not exceptional women to begin with. Mrs. Pankhurst, it is true, came from the radical city of Manchester, where, as a child, she had demonstrated against slavery. But she and her daughters were exactly the kind of high-minded, humorless people who under other circumstances would have been pillars of empire. The movement transformed them: Emmeline (Sian Phillips) revealed a gift for fiery oratory and martyrdom; Christabel (Patricia Quinn) became a genius of strategy; Sylvia (Angela Down) provided the movement's heart and integrity...
Beatty has also been stripped. His buoyant sensuousness and vulnerability have been sheared off, leaving only sullenness. Cast as the wrong kind of stud, he plays a priggish, humorless, overdressed dandy, with pencil-thin eyebrows and moustache, who acts like an eight-year-old. Nicholson plays a bratty little brother to him. Beatty seems too uncomfortable in this role to play it back. The emotional current that should sparkle between them never connects. Their obsessive bickering, which ought to reveal an underlying affection, is irritable rather than responsive and only makes them seem incompatible. They have no signals in common...
Though Ginandes's ambition to allow her subjects to supplement her pictures with their own words in order to provide the viewer with a more comprehensive impression of these women is sincere, the quotes are too long, repetitive and humorless. Worse, the photographs too rarely give us any insight into the character of the sitters. Those that do, like the picture of the lesbian couple sitting on the steps outside their apartment, their faces cool masks of defiant disdain, make the verbal statements superfluous...
...sense that he hates mankind. He hates the web of social hypocrisy in which men and women entangle themselves. He hates everything that in Eliot's words is "as false as a smile and the shake of a hand." His insistence on absolute candor is blind, humorless and therefore funny. He is a moral prig who thinks of himself as the only honest man alive, and he wants the world to recognize it. He tells the truth till it hurts-others. Still, he raises an important question of principle. When does hypocrisy breed corruption...