Word: stand-up
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...bedside phones installed that do not require going through a switchboard. "He sleeps here and has his phone," she says, indicating one side of the queen-size bed. "And I sleep there and have mine." She furnished her husband's private study next to the Oval Office with a stand-up desk, a CD player, framed campaign buttons and a large portrait of herself...
...things too, but they at least come across as friends who might really confide in one another. Maybe because they are, in a sense, all variations on the same person. The series (created by Seinfeld with writer Larry David) is, like several other new-generation sitcoms, an outgrowth of stand-up comedy material. Episodes spin off the sort of trivial incidents and observations that Seinfeld dwells on in his monologues. (Jerry feels guilty over a gift pen; Jerry's girlfriend thinks he picks his nose...
Unlike the well-made, two-act structure of Cheers, Seinfeld episodes are freewheeling, anecdotal and -- paradoxically, for a show based on stand-up material -- almost devoid of typical sitcom one-liners. Here is George, for example, complaining that his new job as a comedy writer is going to waste: "Can you believe my luck? The first time in my life I have a good answer to the question 'What do you do?' and I have a girlfriend. I mean, you don't need a girlfriend when you can answer that question. That's what you say in order...
Home Improvement, in which comedian Tim Allen stars as Taylor -- a husband, father of three boys and host of a TV handyman show -- covers all its bases shrewdly. It combines the ironic edge of Allen's stand-up comedy -- a sort of , macho flip side to Roseanne Arnold's beleaguered-housewife rants -- with traditional family-show sentimentality. It caters to the baby-boom audience while poking gentle fun at it (the kids are puzzled when Mom, played by Patricia Richardson, mentions such names as Edgar Bergen and Ed Sullivan). It toys with the sitcom format in ways both inventive...
...Stand-up comics have gotten rich with routines about the MIT football team. ("Sir? That's actually the 20-yard line segment...") Its squash team hasn't beaten Harvard in 50 years. And its crew teams aren't much better...