Word: stand-up
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...comics are as adored by their constituents as Ellen DeGeneres. She winds up a 36-city tour this week with an HBO special (July 23, 10 p.m. E.T.). It's the first stand-up the comic and actor has done in seven years, having been otherwise engaged in a sitcom, Ellen, that was by turns successful and amusing, then controversial and very funny, then adrift and not funny, then canceled and controversial again. This tour is being touted as the comic's return to her just-me-and-the-microphone roots, albeit a return that's augmented by a retinue...
...comedy is just a touch limper, fluffier. Gone is the economic clarity of early stand-up routines like her phone call to God, what you can tell about people by their groceries (whipped cream, lawn chair, douche) and how toilet seats get wet. Ellen, at her best, is a comedian who could make doubters like Jerry Lewis, who says women aren't funny, curse their Y chromosomes. But in her new routine, God turns out--ooh, novel!--to be a forty-sevenish black woman...
...most harrowing circumstances. After all, most were responses written in the glow of morale boosted by receiving news from home that life was still normal there, that Dad was still priding himself on the tomatoes bursting ripe in the vegetable garden, that Little Brother had just smacked his first stand-up double or that Sis had been accepted at the local university. The mundane details of life in the U.S.--the score of Friday night's football game, the pattern of a soft cotton dress bought special on Main Street--have always been the rare joy of American soldiers...
...also foreign, at first. "Man, they'd cheer an offsides call!" says rink announcer T.D. Smith (who has taken to lighting his cigars with the propane torch the players use to curve their sticks). The club hired a stand-up comic to pull volunteers from the audience and demonstrate each penalty, from high-sticking to cross-checking. And in a place that had no youth hockey, Gators players held clinics and helped organize 15 youth teams...
...Alliance), but created one of the most striking pieces of the evening in a unique performance with improvisational dancer Jessica Kaye '00 and poets Janel Moore '00 and Wilson. Improvisation was central to many performances, including breakdancers Tri Phuong '02 and Chhay Chhun '02, the sometimes bewildered and bewildering stand-up comic Anwar Floyd Pruitt '00 and a number of stand-out freestylers including Kellogg himself. Kellogg called the essence of the show "a hip hop aesthetic, which is fundamentally improvisational. It's a hip-hop aesthetic multiplied into three dimensions. This is actually the most positive thing...