Word: stand-up
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...these are signals sent out by Steve Martin, who is too smart and funny to be fit for a movie idol's straitjacket. He began, in the early 1970s, as a stand-up comic with an unusual persona: a guy determined against all odds -- lack of charm or talent, for example -- to be the life of the party. In his first movies too he made mock of his Waspy features by playing dimwits and cuckolds. Would he restrict himself to updating Jerry Lewis when he could be Cary Grant? Not at all. For with Pennies from Heaven Martin essayed nostalgic...
...gave a final exam Monday night in which students had to do a three-minute stand-up comedy routine in the back room at a pizza restaurant. Topics ranged from dead celebrities to sex to ethnic stereotypes to sex to television evangelists...
...They aren't preparing to be stand-up comics," Jones said. "But I think anyone who completes the class should be able to walk into a tense business meeting and break...
Cable's pay channels -- primarily HBO, Showtime and Cinemax -- early on discovered comedy as a fertile source of original programming. With no network censors to contend with, stand-up comics had virtually free rein in language and subject matter. Comedy concerts featuring everyone from Rodney Dangerfield to Eddie Murphy quickly became staples of the cable schedule. Comedy series inevitably came next. Some, like Showtime's Brothers and HBO's 1st & Ten, have been only marginally different from routine network fare. But HBO's Not Necessarily the News, now in its fifth year, offers welcome dollops of topical (if frequently toothless...
...budding stars of cable's alternative comedy scene, however, are a new group of performers who are pushing the limits of the stand-up genre. Traditional stand-up comedians, from Alan King through Jay Leno, have usually presented themselves as normal folks, people like you and me who happen to have funny things to say about dating or television or life in New York City. The new gang appear onstage as determined misfits -- sometimes menacing, sometimes pathetic, always glaringly out of place. One of the quirkiest is Emo Philips, 31, a waiflike creature with a Prince Valiant haircut who floats...