The initial report was that Bright "joked that Pelosi might lose her own election, decide not to run for the speaker's job or otherwise not be available".
I had heard that the movie was a wizened mockery of the original, so it was a pleasant shock to find just how many of the brightest jokes remain; one of the best, in which an entire intergalactic battle fleet is swallowed by a small dog, "due to a terrible miscalculation of scale," is declaimed during the final credits, as if nobody could bear to leave it out.
Now and again, of course, something does pop — a comical face, a bright laugh, a delightfully smutty joke, the flowers splashed across the dress of one woman and the bright red painted on the trembling lips of another — but time and again they pop individually rather than forming a coherent, sustaining gestalt.
Margaret Lyons of New York Magazine was happy with the evolution of Bailey and Torres' friendship in the first half of the ninth season, calling it "the one bright spot": "They joke, they tease each other, they offer sage love advice to one another, now that they're both on their second marriages".
Hardin, who wore a tan suit and a bright yellow tie, joked with the judge about the date of a future hearing and put his arm around a reporter who followed him as he left afterward.
Bright Okpocha, who jokes under the name Basketmouth, posted a comment suggesting that African women withhold sex so long that it might be necessary to rape them on a ninth date.
Ms. Rice and her highly ingenious creative team — including Neil Murray (sets and costume), Malcolm Rippeth (lighting) and Gemma Carrington and Jon Driscoll (projections) — embroider this melancholy tale with bright songs and jokes that aren't so different from what might have been the live entertainment in a 1930s British movie theater.
Those 12 CES keynotes were generally awkward affairs, tepid pitch-fests where the few bright points were jokes at Gates' own expense, or when things went wrong.
"I'm a singer, and I have a lot of bright ideas," he joked.
The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley praised Alec Baldwin's "slyly absurd comic presence that is bigger and brighter than any joke or character actor on the show", but mentioned that "Nothing very funny happens on 30 Rock until Alec Baldwin enters the room, and suddenly this new NBC sitcom comes alive".
