Word: stand-up
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...could be argued that Williams landed in the right role in the right time slot (8 p.m., when children control the nation's sets). But Williams is not so much lucky as talented. In his stand-up nightclub act, which he does for free, to keep in touch with live audiences and to try out new material, he displays a range that encompasses Jonathan Winters, Danny Kaye, Steve Martin and Daffy Duck. Though always wearing the same costume-baggy pants, loud shirts, suspenders-he whips in and out of a multitude of comic characterizations. He can mimic the cadences...
...prostitute, his brother indignantly defends the girl, and then asks. "Why, did she charge you?" On the whole, however. Simon avoids his usually relentless parade of quips. Chapter Two possesses none of the slick quality that mars some of his earlier plays, which made his characters sound like professional stand-up comedians, not believable human beings. Instead, the humor approaches the way people actually talk or joke, and even helps to crystallize one's impression of the characters. For example, the introductory scenes contrast her automatic efficiency with his numbed disorganization through jokes about the conditions of their respective apartments...
Back toward the front of the building is the Harvard Stand-Up Bar, which in the afterwork crush resembles the Union more than Harvard Hall. The U-shaped bar is made of cork and seems similar to most any spot where well-heeled New Yorkers gather, except in one important respect. No money changes hands at the bar, nor anywhere else in the club. In fitting with the club's extreme gentility, all services must be charged and paid for later. Given the milieu, it comes as a surprise that the convivial Harvard Stand-Up Bar was the scene...
Maybe, just maybe, it is. Jane Wagner, the film's scenarist and director, has long been one of Tomlin's most able comedy writers. At some point, perhaps, she conceived Moment by Moment as an extended stand-up routine or as a screwball romance along the lines of the old Carole Lombard-William Powell comedy, My Man Godfrey (which is quoted in the film). But the movie's subject, a liaison between a bored Beverly Hills matron and a younger man, is too provocative to be entirely laughed away. Wagner deals with this dilemma by switching...
...telephone booth. One has the sense early on in the show that Superman--and indeed all of the characters--step off the pages of a comic book onto the stage. Later on in the play, rather than use regular furniture in the Daily Planet newsroom, Borowitz utilizes flat, stand-up painted desks and typewriters--maintaining that two dimensional feel...