Word: stand-up
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...drama about bad people killing good people and good people killing bad people. There is nothing subtle about this movie. In fact, we are so painfully aware of utter disposability of the plot that we wish Murphy would just step out of the screen and dish out his lines stand-up style. If you need to see people kill each other, go hack up your dormmates...
Theater began with one actor in a mask playing all the parts, relying on his imagination and the audience's. The modern one-person show blends that ancient Greek bravado with the calculated emotional exposure of the stand-up comic. The soloist, unmasked, tells the audience what is about to take place, shaping its reactions, soliciting its affection and implying that the customers are helping create the event rather than passively watching it. In this atmosphere, when the audience applauds some line of dialogue, it is hailing its own perspicacity as well as the actor's. The weakness of Lily...
Though Phylicia Ayers-Allen, as Dr. Huxtable's wife, is too young by a decade, the youngsters who play their rambunctious brood (Lisa Bonet, Malcolm- Jamal Warner, Tempestt Bledsoe and Keshia Knight-Pulliam) are charming. So is Cosby, most of the time. The veteran stand-up comic, commercial pitchman and star of three former TV series has found an ideal format for his gently satiric humor. In the face of life's little annoyances, Cosby's demeanor is a sardonic slow burn; his response, exasperated hyperbole. "I had a rough day yesterday," he complains. "Every child born on the face...
...novel's obsession with death, culture, freedom, sex and sanity. White Noise is not some peevish tabloid revision of 1984. The book never stays sour and it never makes the tiring (because irrefutable) claim that TV has become the average man's Big Brother. Instead, DeLillo writes like a stand-up comedian building variations around a central 326-page-long joke. The media, neo-angst about World War 111, and trendy consumer society constitute one large punching bag, and the deadpanned oneliners seem endless. DeLillo has the greatest sense of the macabre since Poe, although without the ravenous-knock-your...
Iacocca claims that before he took Dale Carnegie courses at age 25, he was a terrible speechmaker. Nowadays in public, and often in private, he seems more a crackling stand-up monologuist than a sober corporate spokesman, a sort of Rodney Dangerfield who gets all the respect in the world, or George C. Scott's Patton turned happy and unthreatening. "I gotta tell ya," Iacocca told a wined-and-dined gathering of stock-market analysts in Detroit earlier this month, "with our $2.4 billion in profits last year, they gave me a great big bonus. Really, it's almost obscene...