Word: stand-up
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...hear the one about Jon Lovitz banging Andy Dick's head into a bar last week? How about the one about Dave Chappelle being hospitalized for "exhaustion" over the weekend? Even by the forgiving behavioral standards of show business, an industry that treats DUIs like parking tickets, stand-up comics manage to stand out as problem performers. Lots of them are moody, prickly and perfectionistic; many struggle with depression and substance abuse. And, as evidenced by the March suicide of comic Richard Jeni, some comics never get loud enough laughs to bring them peace...
...take that to be just a typical spot of second act trouble, something to be triumphantly overcome in the movie's third act. Except that it isn't. The implication is that Dewey, now his full-time manager, believed Petey could be turned into a stand-up comic, a black guy spouting one-liners designed to titillate a white audience suddenly attuned to the black outrage they had never before heard. That, however, was not Petey. And he knew it. He could talk fast, all right, but he was at heart a free-associating yarn spinner...
...talked his way into a stand-up gig at a comedy club in Pasadena, Calif. "My thing was the 50-year-old mouth on the 10-year-old body," LaBeouf says. He took to the stage in overalls, with a bowl haircut, and "the first words out of my mouth would be 'Listen, assholes,'" he says. "Sometimes I would bomb. I'd talk about personal stuff and instead of laughing, people would look at me like, 'Oh, man, I'm so sorry.'" The potty-mouthed-preteen act only took him so far, so at age 11 LaBeouf found an agent...
...personas of most of today's funny guys could be said to flow from Steve Martin. As a stand-up comic in the '70s, he played the idiot with an utterly unwarranted belief in his coolness, while in his first hit movie, The Jerk, he played ... a jerk. The first type has bloomed in the strutting film personalities of Ferrell, Vaughn, Jack Black, Owen Wilson and many others; the second in Sandler, who teams this summer with another lout, TV's Kevin James, in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Lower on this fast-food chain are Rob Schneider...
...very easy on the eyes, and Matt Damon, and lots of the old gang in smaller roles: Bernie Mac, Andy Garcia, Carl Reiner, Don Cheadle, Elliott Gould, Casey Affleck. Julia Roberts took this film off, but Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin - last seen together 18 years ago, performing urgent stand-up sex in Sea of Love- are on board for star wattage and the nostalgia factor. Sounds eminently sit-throughable and, on the big Palais screen, watchable...