Word: stand-up
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...protagonist, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) is Bob Fosse--no point in rehashing the one-to-one correspondences. He is a talented director/choreographer staging a Broadway musical starring his former wife, editing a movie about a stand-up comic, and indulging his active libido in assorted hopeful chorines. He drives everyone hard, but himself the hardest ("To be on the wire is life; the rest is nothing"), waking up with Dexedrine and cigarettes--a tortured, uncompromising bastard. He is also a song-and-dance man, who doesn't know "where the bullshit ends and the truth begins." "I got insight into...
...typical stand-up booth is about three feet square and lined with reflectors and Westinghouse lamps of varying lengths that look like fluorescent lights but emit an average total of 560 watts of long-and medium-frequency ultraviolet rays. Unlike the infra-red sun lamps used at home, these lights give off very little heat. Doctors have long used them to treat serious skin conditions; the franchisers have merely put them in tanning booths. One minute under the lamps is said to equal an hour in the summer sun; sometimes ten visits are needed before the "sun worshiper" starts sporting...
Taking advantage of his large size and excellent coordination, Lau meshes flopping and straight stand-up techniques to keep the puck out of the net. This style--"or lack thereof," he says--proved particularly effective against UNH this year when the defending ECAC champions pelted Lau with over 40 shots but beat him only once--a fluke shot which deflected off a player's leg into...
...funeral directors are expected to be lank, lugubrious, waxen creatures like their customers, Mickey Milam, a smiling cherub of a man, provides the perfect antistereotype. In the Chapel of the Chimes, flanked by potted palms and backed by taped music, Mickey delivers his stand-up speech on the history, evolution, and utter necessity of the funeral home professional. Who else knows just how to suture the lips shut? Who else knows just where to make the incision so "you're gonna get your best drainage...
...latest case, Charles, on a reconciliatory week at the seaside with his estranged wife, is present at a variety show when a stand-up comedian literally turns into a live wire: a booby-trapped guitar electrocutes him when he grabs a microphone in the other hand. The hunt for the killer gives Brett a chance to do those set pieces that distinguish his books, notably one in which a domineering talk show host is reduced to helpless blithering by a deftly counterpunching old comic (who is an admirably wise and well-developed character) and another satirizing those ghastly award shows...