Word: shtick
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...they are doing laundry. They understand that washing machines eat socks." In the '90s these changes are amplified on the nightclub circuit, where 20% of the comics are female, up from perhaps 2% a decade ago. Even that minuscule group used to give itself the short end of the shtick: "When I was born I was so ugly, the doctor slapped my mother." In comedy's Paleolithic era, notes Budd Friedman, impresario of Los Angeles' Improv comedy club, "stand-up was traditionally a white male enclave. But today there are no restrictions. Women are able to use their intelligence...
...liability. They are scrambling to recast themselves as populist crusaders whose main reason for being in the nation's capital is to fight against its wicked ways. Says Larry Harrington, a Democratic Senate campaign strategist: "Everybody is playing the outsider. That's this year's shtick...
...overboard in showing respect to the citizenry. Some of the newer stock characters, like the Korean greengrocer and the Indian news dealer, aren't certain how to act yet -- there haven't been enough movies about them -- but when they do get it all hardened into a New York shtick, I rather doubt that they're going to sound like the flight attendant of the month...
That quip was uncharacteristic of a man who scrupulously separates the clarinetist from the comedian and never tells a joke on the bandstand: when Woody is playing jazz, he's all stick and no shtick. Not that funny things haven't happened in connection with Woody's music. When he and his New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra first got together in the early '70s, they were summarily ejected from the first few clubs they played in because their music was so noncommercial. At one establishment, the band was fired in the middle of a particularly lugubrious spiritual, after...
...President. As a lead-up to that year's Democratic Convention in Chicago, they vowed to spike the local water supply with LSD. The schemes were mostly put-ons and fodder for the press, Hoffman's most faithful co-conspirator. It was revolution as street shtick...