Word: makeing
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Comedy. Stand-up comedy, once relegated to nightclubs and TV variety shows, is now big business. Its practitioners work comedy clubs, the concert circuit and cable TV, where their material is available to children. One way to get attention, to appear hip, to make a provocative point or just to give a joke some taboo oomph, is to talk dirty. Plenty of comics don't; the most popular TV comedian of the '80s is clean (and funny) Jay Leno. But plenty do. Just watch them on HBO or Showtime. Sam Kinison, a kind of defrocked evangelist of red-neck rage...
Lenny Bruce's triumph was posthumous, and maybe Pyrrhic: because of him, Andrew Dice Clay can make millions reciting dirty nursery rhymes in public. Clay and the other new raunch artists, most of them, are only incidentally subversive. They don't believe for a moment, most of them, what they're saying. Metal musicians are no serious Satanists; their concerts are just theater pieces -- Cats with a nasty yowl. Clay is not the pathetic strutting stud he seems onstage; that's just a character. (Was Jack Benny really stingy? Is Pee-wee Herman really a goony child?) Bruce said what...
SOME AMERICANS ABROAD. Hard as it is to imagine why anyone thought the pretensions and crotchets of some second-rate college professors on tour in England would make a play, it's harder still to comprehend why the deadly dull result is transferring to Broadway. It is a pallid apery of the academic comedies that the English, frankly, do better...
...economics. He was our man in Warsaw from 1981 to 1983, when the drive for reform was flagging, and in Beijing from 1985 to 1987. "It has been the theme of my career," says Hornik, "that I go to these places where they try to reform but never quite make...
Gorbachev's announcement last week that he was postponing shock therapy for the Soviet economy -- the core of the remedy recommended by Hewett and Hornik -- has redoubled doubts about whether the U.S.S.R. will make it. Still, nobody is counting Gorbachev out yet. "We can't just take what he is saying, that he won't let prices float, at face value," says Hewett. "This is not the kind of thing that you announce with a lot of lead time." In the end, the Soviet President -- whom Hewett calls a "man I would not want to play poker with" -- may well...