Word: stand-up
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...retired at 52, having become bored with his six-year job as a director of information development for a software company, he decided to start a consulting practice. With a master's degree in physics, a Ph.D. in philosophy and experience in computers, marketing, advertising, college teaching and even stand-up comedy, Fried figured that he could earn extra money by opening some kind of business out of his home. "I didn't feel I had enough money socked away to retire as comfortably as I would have liked," he says. "At the same time, I needed a change...
...Truman Show, but this version of it is more like 1983's The King of Comedy, in which would-be comedian Rupert Pupkin (Robert DeNiro), an obsessive fan of late-night talk-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), kidnaps his idol to get a shot at doing his stand-up act on TV. It's no longer enough for Pupkin to admire Langford; he must become him. If Pupkin had just waited 20 years, he could have got a show on E! network. E!'s The Michael Essany Show, starting in March, will follow a young man from Valparaiso...
George Carlin, he says, "made the language his personal puppet. He took words and phrases and sliced them eight different ways." Richard Pryor, he says, was perhaps the greatest artist of all stand-ups; his stories had beautiful and elaborate structures. Seeing both Carlin and Pryor onscreen, though, you feel the anger simmering beneath their routines. Stand-ups have a quarrel with the universe, a chip on their shoulder that they turn into comedy. "Stand-up is socialized aggression," says...
...Seinfeld doesn't see his old job as an aberration in a lifelong career as a stand-up. "The show worked," he says, "because it absorbed the rule of stand-up comedy, which is, If it's not funny, don't bring it up. In the show, something was either funny or setting up something that was funny, or it wasn't in." He says he likes his former partner Larry David's HBO show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, for precisely the same reason...
Seinfeld has a second child on the way. He got married for the first time at 45 and found that the institution suits him. Early in Comedian, he tries to cheer up a disheartened young stand-up by telling him his favorite show-business story. The plane carrying Glenn Miller's band is forced to land in a snowstorm. Two of the musicians are trudging through a snowy field and see a snug little cabin in front of them. They peer through the window and see a husband and wife laughing with their two apple-cheeked children in front...