Word: laughless
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...show’s inconsistency remains the same as it ever was as well. After two solid shows, the third episode, hosted by Barrymore, was just terrible—a laughless hour-and-a-half marred by endless unfunny skits, flubbed line readings and an amount of crack-ups that crossed the line from endearing to unprofessional. But that stinker was probably an anomaly. After all, it aired the day after an anthrax scare in the building, it was the third straight show after the always obsessed-over season premiere and it didn’t have a single appearance...
...laughless comedies deliver their mixed messages more deftly, if not always more successfully. Hooperman, starring John Ritter as a San Francisco cop, is essentially a Hill Street Blues combination of crime-show action, broad comedy and "sensitive" character drama, slickly done but a bit overripe for its half-hour length. The Slap Maxwell Story, with Dabney Coleman as an oafish sportswriter, opts for a looser structure and more melancholy tone. Slap is a blustering loser who is constantly getting socked in the face, pushed around by his boss and dumped on by women; when his estranged son shows...
...fortunes and Richard Nixon's. His uncertain promise that they were going to be good boys and stay away from politics raised hopes that wickedness might win out and they would at least tell a Jerry Ford joke or something. No such luck- just a succession of laughless sketches, totally lacking any link with an identifiable aspect of life as it is lived by anyone, any where. Redd Foxx came off worst among the guest stars in a distasteful bit about mixed marriage. The Smotherses are on a short-term contract, which means there are now only twelve weeks...
...Laughless Days. Brassens, 43, known around Montparnasse as the "Bear," comes out of seclusion to sing only three months out of the year. Last week he was holding forth before jampacked audiences at Paris' Bobino Theater. He sang of the brutalities of war, the vagaries of love, the folly of politics, and the hardships of being a gravedigger ("Farewell, poor dead one; if from the bottom of the hole one sees God, tell him how much pain that last shovelful cost me"), or a streetwalker: Even though those damned bourgeois call them girls of pleasure...
Born contemporaries, the two poets are, in most things else, remote relations. Irish MacNeice finds Iceland interesting chiefly as one more queer spot in which to wonder what the devil he is doing there. Sometimes he tries to give a laughless explanation...
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