In the supercool world of British stand-up, Evans makes an unusually generous effort to amuse his crowd.
You have in this film a party given by Ann Broderick, a billionairess, who strains every effort to amuse and entertain her guests.
Yet this information is evidence that some people, in various places, everywhere in fact, work themselves and some unimaginable constituency into a lather, strike poses of indignation, mint watery sarcasms, make shaky efforts to amuse each other, inhabit a bubble of epiphenomena that popped for the rest of us quite a while ago.
Previous efforts to rejuvenate the Oscars mostly flopped, including last year's event, which paired an ill-prepared, disaffected James Franco with a hypereager Anne Hathaway and had them try to amuse youth with lame jokes about text messages, Twitter and iPhone apps.
Louis-Dreyfus was amused: she had recently made an effort to "green up the set" of her CBS show, "The New Adventures of Old Christine," which had just concluded a five-year run.
The African ministers seem amused at Washington's sudden interest in helping them build a stronger textile industry, and reasonably regard it as an effort to change the subject from the subsidy issue.
At 16, George Parker invented a game to amuse his brothers on a wet afternoon.
Now it's worthless, just a toy, something to amuse a child.
