Word: monologist
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...word hip to Henry Rollins, manic stage monologist and now the tattooed front man of the Rollins Band, a group sacred to many college radio stations. He winces. "Hip has become a lot of asses to kiss, a lot of places to be, a lot of parties to go to." Try it out on the poet Allen Ginsberg, who helped invest the idea with meaning in the '50s. After carefully distinguishing some current notions of hip from the outcast's lucidity that was his vision of it all, he lets loose. "An upper-bourgeois life-style con. A camouflage...
...Leary lacks the oratorical grace of Gray (Swimming to Cambodia) or the comic wisdom of monologist Eric Bogosian (Talk Radio), but he's learning. "When Leary first started doing stand-up, like all of us -- he sucked," says comic Eddie Brill, Emerson '80, a friend. That began to change after Leary's father died of a heart attack in 1985. In response to such an event, says Brill, "you can either go into a fetal position or do what Leary did -- just lash out. He became really deep and really funny...
...Ever After, Swift has managed the feat again, devising a hypnotically complex examination set amid the circular staircases and false fronts of a strange man's brain. The monologist is Bill Unwin, 52, an honorary fellow of a Cambridge college who begins his tale with "These are, I should warn you, the words of a dead man." Three weeks earlier, he was rescued from "attempted self-slaughter." Now, immured in his unreal world, he recalls, simultaneously, his boyhood in Paris, his discovery of the diary of a 19th century forebear, his life as the husband of an actress...
...institution, and Leno must make it his own. "Letterman," Leno says, "is a comedy show that happens to have guests. The Tonight show is a talk show that happens to have comedy." Leno is adept with the comedy; the guests are a problem. While Leno is peerless as a monologist, his interviewing is still amateurish. He sometimes seems like a guest on his own show, polite and admiring -- an usher at the wedding, not the groom...
...SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. As a play starring monologist Lily Tomlin, this was a solo dazzle and a terrific human comedy. Through a dozen or so characters, it provided a panoramic 20-year history of American womanhood. Her film version displays volcanic emotions, precisely explored...