Word: humorless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nation need all the unifying rituals and symbols we can find. They killed off Elvis. They forced Carson to retire. And they turned "Saturday Night Live" into repetitive, humorless drivel. Now they're trying to take Santa Claus and Christmas trees from us. It's time to fight back...
...great faults. He was anti- Semitic and terminally rude, even to close friends. He was a remote, absentee father who viewed his offspring with suspicion and alarm. "My children weary me," he once confided to his diary. "I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless." Perhaps in reaction to his frugal middle-class upbringing, he became an aristocrat-toadying snob who tended to confuse proper breeding with moral worth...
From the moment he appears onstage, uniformed and martial, barking out "Now is the winter of our discontent" with the guttural fury of a drill sergeant, Sir Ian McKellen's Richard III is arrestingly cruel and humorless, all chill and absolutely no charm. Not for him the leisurely glories of the play's language or the seductions of direct address and droll comedy to woo an audience. In a role that can epitomize the concept of the villain one loves to hate, McKellen avoids anything lovable or even approachable. This production, which has won raves from London to Cairo...
Indeed not. As casting began, Altman knew he needed someone to play a movie star playing a smirky action-adventure hero, somebody else to play a movie star playing a humorless ingenue -- a Bruce Willis type and, say, a Julia Roberts type. He asked Willis and Roberts. "They were the first people we chose. I was going to start going from there -- I never dreamed we'd get both of them." He also got Burt Reynolds, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger, Cher and a horde of other six- and seven-figure actors to play themselves for a few hundred dollars apiece...
...escapism is more timeless: this is an all-black show with absolutely no references to white people, pro or con. The nearest it comes to relevance is a rudimentary feminism, at one point disavowing the sexism of some of the vintage numbers. One can get all humorless and huffy about the feathered costume for Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chickens and the rest of the cheery inanity. One can insist that the theater be meaningful and memorable. Or one can, more sensibly, check one's higher consciousness at the door and have a shallow but rollicking time...