As a pal pithily puts it, "How do you orchestrate such cliffhangers in your life?" As delivery day draws ever closer, things get predictably more and more fraught with a scene-stealing Emma Thompson, playing Bridget's GP,
drolly remarking, "Bring along the father, if you can work out which one he is."
"War on Christmas" language is responded to deftly, with Johnson both demythologizing popular stories about it (carols not forbidden, greetings not routed, schools not rendered hostile toward celebrations) and
drolly pointing out that a 96-percent celebration rate leaves the "war" lost in advance.
In their
drolly titled 2013 commentary, "Does Doing Media Violence Research Make One Aggressive?," Ferguson and his colleague, German researcher Malte Elson, invite readers to contemplate a thought experiment as a way to think about the plausibility of the "monkey see/monkey do" theory.
In a phone call to discuss the first-ever home video release of "Batman,'' which co-starred Burt Ward as Robin, Alan Napier as butler Alfred and Neil Hamilton as the police commissioner, West cuts
drolly to the chase.
Viewers who have long admired his
drolly innovative disregard for the latter will imagine that their deployment here is strategic one, a moment of sustained attention to a particular form that's more of a means to understanding it than an artifactual, or conceptual, end.
We have about 800 people working here," it
drolly revealed.
So the President was rallying the troops Tuesday night--more specifically "Organizing for Action," the "outfit formerly known as his re-election campaign," as the Wall Street Journal's James Freeman
drolly put it.
("While all art is in some sense demanding," Dickstein
drolly observes, "only the legacy of modernism makes this degree of engagement the precondition for major art, which, after all, can be ingratiating as well as exacting.")
Some songs land virtually intact, albeit in up-to-date arrangements: an innocent "I Say a Little Prayer" a
drolly comic male duet on "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" and Nathaly Lopez's slow, thoughtful and altogether beautiful take on "Don't Make Me Over." Nobody messes with "Close to You," either, although it loses its deadly romantic earnestness when sung by seven giddy performers piled into an overstuffed sofa.
For this one, JD writes
drolly: "Looks can be deceiving." Several of the paintings express the women's desire to return to their home countries.
Or, as the captain of a charter pirate ship
drolly observes, "Any man fleeing from the police with three women, two children and an orangutan is a friend of mine."
"The Froudean mechanic," which McEntegart
drolly characterizes as "diplomacy by trigonometrical tables," is still alive and well (8, 2).
His pacing is very relaxed, drawing the reader into the story at only its key moments and
drolly allowing them to play out with the decompression of a Wes Anderson film.
