Word: twist
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...Arsenic was ever funny seems a mystery. This alleged black comedy is really a Victorian comedy of manners in disguise. Mortimer Brewster and Elaine Harper are in love, but the antics and machinations of his relatives threaten to destroy the romance. The twist is that his relatives are all crazy, and some of their antics are murderous...
Chanting in the dusky gloom before a battle, a robed figure stoops and ignites a circle of blue flame in the red clay soil around him. With one quick twist, a woman fluffs her white veil into swaddling and so conjures up a baby in arms. Horns blare as a crowd of celebrants, resplendent in red, holds aloft a richly caparisoned tent for the wedding of a blind king. A master of military arts orders a disciple to cut off his right thumb and thereby lose his strength and skill. "It is not cruelty," the teacher explains. "It is foresight...
Once past thirtysomething and A Year in the Life, TV's family album gets considerably bleaker. Fully assembled nuclear families are scarce on the season's new sitcoms; swinging singles and unattached parents are in. One new twist, however, is a trend to half-hour shows that eschew laugh tracks or live audiences and aim instead for the mixed moods of comedy-drama. The technique does not always work -- witness CBS's Frank's Place, a languid, unfunny variation on Cheers set in a New Orleans Creole restaurant. More promising is The "Slap" Maxwell Story, with Dabney Coleman...
...emotions are easier to evoke than fear and pity. But comedy is hard. It takes Astaire timing and kamikaze cojones to stand on a stage or a sound stage and do this: wear a novelty-store arrow on your head; blow up balloons, twist them into animal shapes and announce the resulting sculpture as "venereal disease!"; tap-dance maniacally when seized with an attack of "Happy Feet"; then build a movie career running variations on a character you might call the suburban jerk. And mainly this: wait bravely for years until your public gets the comic point...
...mines, discovered after one blasted a hole in the U.S.-owned tanker Texaco Caribbean, added a lethal new twist to Washington's showdown with Iran. The explosives were the first to be found in the Gulf of Oman, a vital staging area for ships plying the Persian Gulf. Although the U.S.-escorted Bridgeton struck what appeared to be an Iranian mine last month, that mishap occurred hundreds of miles inside the Persian Gulf. One result of the new danger was a change of heart by Britain and France, which decided to rush minesweepers to the region after...