Word: slapstick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with sales of more than 150,000, is one of the surprise hits of the home-video field. A takeoff on the multitude of golf instructional tapes, it features Conway standing on his knees to appear like a midget and doing a slow burn through a feeble series of slapstick gags. A newly released sequel, Dorf and the First Games of Mt. Olympus, has even less point or wit, as the character participates in the hurdles, pole vault and other Olympic events with the help of trick photography...
...Rabbit. For a few minutes of inventive mayhem, the infant crawls toward every lethal kitchen appliance while his harried hare of a baby-sitter works frantically to keep things from blowing up. It's the comedy of anticipated disaster -- the nightmare anxiety that propelled so many of Avery's slapstick tragedies -- and it works just fine. Too fine: the opening cartoon upstages the movie that emerges from...
...scene was a curious mixture of high drama and slapstick satire. Michael Dukakis, only hours away from the climactic triumph of his primary season, tries to hold a private midnight meeting with Jesse Jackson. His Secret Service limousine takes him to a back door of the Hyatt Wilshire in Los Angeles, where Jackson is staying. Reporters, alerted to the rendezvous, race through the hotel, but Dukakis evades them. Jackson's suite is a mess. As aides dispose of the remains of a chicken-and-greens dinner, Secret Service agents sweep swarming journalists from the corridor...
...Slapstick--intentional or not--seemed to draw the most attention in the visual arts. After all, this was the year that students in a Visual and Environmental Studies course were asked to kill a chicken and make a sculpture out of its bones...
...centerpiece of these shows. Lucille Ball's face has been seen by more people in the world, more often, than the face of anyone else in history, according to TV Guide's analysis. Her incredible range of comic facial expression is light years ahead of Cosby, and her innovative slapstick has influenced several subsequent generations of comedians. At last year's first annual American Comedy Awards, winners Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin both paid homage to Lucy in their acceptance speeches...