Word: vaudevillian
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...this is fine, since none of Willis’s fans pretend to enjoy his act on a musical level. Rather, they enjoy the comic relief involved in the almost vaudevillian (and certainly pathetic) spectacle of Willis’ psychopathology. They come to laugh at the leper’s festering lesions in a shameless display of Schadenfreude. This in itself is a disease inherent in American culture: We enjoy seeing others flounder and make fools of themselves...
...outdone is Akhmanova's Princess, whose delicacy is tested when she has to climb up twenty mattresses to get to sleep, and ends up tossing and turning half the night. Akhmanova approaches the role with vaudevillian flair, she is superbly comic yet always charming and graceful...
...still around this past Christmas Eve when Osborne, 65, died of diabetes and other complaints. And Osborne was not such a radical that he couldn't find use for the great old British lions; in The Entertainer he gave Laurence Olivier his meatiest modern role as a decayed vaudevillian. But with Look Back in Anger, the 26-year-old actor-author, who never went to university and who, only a year before, was playing callow Freddy Eynsford Hill in a road-company Pygmalion, forever changed the face of theater...
...woman shows, Bernhard offers a vaudevillian hybrid--part comedy, part song, part dramatic monologue. This genre-bending works to keep audiences perennially on edge as she prods, sometimes viciously, at American popular culture. Bernhard may be trying for something similar with this book, described on the jacket as "a mix of memoir, fiction, invented memoir, and fiction that rings with the truth." This mostly means that these pieces feel unfinished or uncertain. Too many read like abandoned short stories or tiny ideas stretched unconvincingly over a few pages...
Privilege begins with a lucky roll of the genes. Candice's father was the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, a dapper vaudevillian in top hat and tux, who with his monocled dummy, Charlie McCarthy, made every radio appearance seem like a Broadway opening night. Her mother is Frances Westerman, a fashion model renowned in her youth as "the Ipana Girl." Edgar and Frances made quite a pair: handsome, smart, moneyed, decent. And they made quite a daughter, one at ease with her favors, slow to complain about being too lovely or too little loved. If aloof Edgar at times seemed closer...