The early notices suggest that Hope was an efficient comic rather than an inspired one — a swift retailer of as many jokes as he could borrow from other comedians or steal from magazines.
The early notices suggest that Hope was an efficient comic rather than an inspired one a swift retailer of as many jokes as he could borrow from other comedians or steal from magazines.
That he was being sold as a comic rather than as an actor?
Then again, it may be that it's Strange Interlude that is irretrievably comic, rather than asides themselves – an experiment that was worth trying once as a means of getting closer to the tragedy of life, but which is of most interest now because of the categorical nature of the results that came back.
After the heady exuberance of Platonov, Ivanov makes a slightly more muted impact: the reason, I suspect, is that Chekhov here alternates the tragic and the comic rather than merging them into a molten whole.
There's no getting away from the uncanny valley phenomenon here, but presumably in an effort to make that effect comic rather than sinister, the avatars have a cartoonish air, rather than going after exact photo-realism.
Tim Vine is a cheerfully comic, rather than pathetic, Buttons who hurls gags at us in great profusion, acts as a choric commentator (asked how everything could have gone so wrong, he replies: "I suppose you could start with the script") and, the night I was there, treated an unduly demonstrative kid, rashly invited on stage, with exemplary courtesy.
Sullivan was by this time viewed with suspicion in high-minded musical circles for composing comic rather than grand operas; Cowen was regarded more as a conductor than as a composer; and the other three, though seen as promising, had not so far made a clear mark as Stanford had done.
"Awkward," though it has hardly been created with an audience of Michele Bachmann constituents in mind, is a distinctly PG enterprise, its sophistication comic rather than erotic.
