Word: jokey
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...send-up" of [adjective] thing = [same adjective]. So a cool jokey advertisement that makes fun of stupid manipulative ads is, surprised, stupid and mainpulative. A TV show that tires to give us some distance from the mind-numbing banality of music videos is, you guessed it, mind-numbingly banal. A movie which attempts cleverly to poke fun at the genre of bomb chase movies will be hard-pressed not to end up as a dumb chase movie. The same with "The Player:" for all its inside jokes and self-affacement, it ended up seeming too much like the kind...
This is not realistic fiction; it's Glocca Morra with a boarded-up main street. Or maybe Yoknapatawpha lite. At its thinnest it seems more jokey than funny. Occasionally, it threatens to become patronizing. Most of the time it works, however, not so much because the author keeps things stirred up but because he persuades the reader to share his great, openhearted fondness for his ridiculous characters. A compact is signed, Russo saying something like, "O.K., yeah, Sully's being a bit of a jerk, but watch what he's going to do now . . ." Or, "Did you meet Vera...
Because Eugene is the channel for the whole drama, the performance of his character is crucial to the success of the play. Bill Selig portrays Eugene as narrator and character both with natural ease. He manages to sustain a candid, jokey rapport with the audience and at the same time can lose himself in his interactions with the rest of the cast...
...quarrel only with the inclusion of "Spacehopper," a jokey sex ditty which could profitably have been replaced by the title track or the haunting "A Crack in the Clouds." My Nation Underground (1988) was more of the same, although a little uneven. "Charlotte Anne" (say it fast) presents a sadder, gentler Julian, singing "The sound you bring is an antiquated thing/ So please don't look to me for guidance" over airy keyboards and a martial beat. The inclusion of the string-sodden "China Doll" is inexplicable...
...STAR (Simon & Schuster; $23). The new novel, a sequel to Terms of Endearment, is big, flabby and aimless. It picks up Terms' Aurora Greenway in her 70s and deals lengthily with the impotence of her 80-year-old lover, who has taken to exposing himself. There's more, equally jokey and unfunny. Before the book's midpoint, the reader asks himself the question that should have occurred to the book's editor: Why am I spending time with these people...