Word: wasps
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Allen gives himself a wonderfully comic urban background, Jewish and lower-class; the family home stands -shakily-beneath the Coney Island roller coaster. It is all in hopeless contrast with her Wasp Middle Westernism. When the pair finally get to L.A., Allen refuses to see it, as most recent movies have, as merely spaced out. To him, it is actively malevolent-the biggest clogged drain of them...
...like many another Irishman, Corry has a real gift for story-telling. Within the contours of his historical narrative lurk all the denizens of the fantasy-world that became the home of the Irish aristocracy: the friendly politicians eager to hobnob with the new barons of industry, the neighboring WASP lords eager to secure a feudal alliance with the pillars of Catholicism and--always--the family priests, eager to anchor all that money and prestige to the firm rock of the Church. It's the stuff of which grand anecdotes are made, and Corry makes the most of his material...
...backyard between Papa Geminiani (Danny Aiello), who proudly displays the stigmata of the lower middle class, and his 21-year-old Harvard-educated son, Francis (Robert Picardo). To make the culture gap wider, two of Francis' friends drop in unexpectedly from Cambridge, a brother-sister duo of unblemished Wasp credentials-or "white people" in Papa's olive-pure lingo. Francis goes into a panic of sexual ambivalence. The sister (Carol Potter) is crazy about him and Francis is queer for her brother (Reed Birney), or so he fears. What ensues, with no little assistance from some wacky neighbors...
...good as the one of Roberto Unger, the only professor whose lecture style undergraduates are likely to recognize, they're very funny--but if you've never taken the courses, who knows?) to jokes about job placement interviews (the recruiter tells an insect-costumed student, "The last WASP we had working for us went to Raid. Isn't that funny, a WASP working for a Raid company?"). All of the jokes rely on knowing the institution thoroughly...
...domestic smile as if about to explain how to remove coffee stains; she eyes a man in the room and exclaims with sweet enthusiasm, "What a hunk!" Mary's humor was usually reactive; the funny one-liners revolved around her. Often they concerned her war against her own Wasp primness and repression. "I always wash my hair before I go to the hair dresser," she once confessed disconsolately. "When ever anyone's stomach rumbles, I'm terrified that someone will think...