Word: dumbness
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Boom Boom Room belongs to the modern mode of encounter drama. As a kind of existential soap opera it could be retitled "Chrissy Bumps into Life." Chrissy (Madeline Kahn) is a dumb, pitiable, wistful lump of humanity. She encounters people who, if they were objects, would be found rusting away in the town dump. It is the fashionable conviction of many young playwrights, including David Rabe, that the planet is currently populated by lesbians, homosexuals, sadistic drunks, incestuous fathers, maternal vultures and men with the ingrained instincts of rapists...
...preview of the première (all shows are taped in advance in Los Angeles without a studio audience), Host Tom Snyder opened with a scathingly opinionated monologue on the Agnew resignation. He castigated the "pious and sanctimonious bilge coming out of Washington" and concluded with the comment: "How dumb do they think we are?" By the time the show went on the air the next morning, however, the network had forced Snyder to retape his opener, omitting his critical broadside...
...inability to think of more than two or three ways for a vampire to sidle up menacingly behind his victim's back means that the sidlings quickly become repetitious. Less excusable is the distressing obviousness with which Renfield eavesdrops on everyone's conversations: the Victorians may have been dumb, but surely they weren't deaf and blind...
...that Grandma and that kindly old magic computer in fact did not write the book for him-since most of the "personalizing" is confined to the repetitious use of names, addresses and birth dates, and every kid on the block with a Me-Book is doing the same dumb things in the same dumb volume. This kind of personalization is in fact just the reverse: it saps imagination and reduces individuality...
Lesley is initially an appealing character; proud, self-sufficient, wonderful in her precociousness. In first grade, she calls the teacher a "dumb fuck;" she extends that assessment coolly to all surrounding people and events. She stands slouching remotely from everything, alternately coy or arrogant, ready always with the correct line or manner. There is something arresting about her decisive mastery of otherwise untenable situations...