Word: stand-up
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...SantaLand. From his weeks wandering the candy cane-lined mazes of SantaLand and pretending to cavort with mechanical penguins, Sedaris has defracted a chilling portrait of that dark region of the New York shopper's soul which emerges at Christmas. His eye is merciless and this memoir reads like stand-up Dante. Sedaris has seen what most of us choose not to, and we should be grateful for his act of witness. He can say with Whitman, "I was the man, I suffered, I was there...
...table was covered with a checkerboard Con-Tact paper, and Dusty began peeling it off. Then he became intrigued with the spilled cereal and started stomping it to bits. At this point his mother interceded. In a firm but calm voice she told her son to get the stand-up dust pan and broom and clean up the mess. Dusty got out the dust pan but forgot the rest of the order. Within seconds he was dismantling the plastic dust pan, piece by piece. His next project: grabbing three rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom and unraveling them around...
...when most comedians are too cool to care, here's an odd twist: the two best stand-up comics on TV are the ones who have ventured most boldly into the political arena. Not the easy-to-take, nonpartisan "topicality" of Leno and Letterman, but informed, savvy, opinionated comedy about real issues. Miller and Maher are helping stand-up comedy escape from its contemporary cul- de-sac, where Jerry Seinfeld clones obsess about sex, TV and life's little annoyances. These two comics read the whole newspaper -- not just the funny clippings their writers collect for them...
...drama. Joan Rivers depicts herself thrashing through her husband's well-stocked medicine cabinet after learning that he has killed himself in a Philadelphia hotel room. Later, still bereaved but completely broke, she appears on Hollywood Squares and, less than two months after Edgar is buried, returns to the stand-up circuit. (Sample joke: "My husband wanted to be cremated. I told him I'd scatter his ashes at + Neiman Marcus . . . That way I'd visit him every day.") All this reactive, forced levity doesn't sit well with Melissa, who throws tantrums and winds up in the arms...
...Rivers with collaborators Erin Sanders and Lonny Price, the play is based on the life of comedian Lenny Bruce's mother, whom Rivers met in a Las Vegas coffee shop eight years ago. Deserted by her husband on their wedding night, Marr, already pregnant, became a so-so stand-up comic while she raised her son in a gay boardinghouse. When Lenny died of a drug overdose in 1966, she was left destitute and in charge of his only daughter...