Word: stand-up
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George Carlin is an anachronism in more ways than one. His shoulder-length hair and hipster attitude are throwbacks to the 1960s. His political passion recalls a time when stand-up comics actually stood up for something. And for 30 years he has continued to make comedy albums: Back in Town, his latest, is his 17th. But now it seems that Carlin has hung around long enough to be back in step with the times. Four comedy CDs--by Jeff Foxworthy, Adam Sandler, "Weird Al" Yankovic and the Jerky Boys--have made it to Billboard's Top 25 this year...
Comedians turned away from recordings during the 1980s, opting for sitcoms and HBO concerts instead. But now they--and audiences--are rediscovering an art form with unique pleasures and possibilities. Many albums, of course, still do little more than preserve live stand-up performances. Ellen DeGeneres, for example, has just released her first album, Taste This, a sampler of surprisingly retro stand-up routines (imagine, a comedian who still jokes about airplane food!). A funnier addition to the genre comes from Robert Schimmel (Robert Schimmel Comes Clean), whose X-rated ruminations on bodily functions and anal sex are redeemed...
Early reaction to the PDA concept was mixed at best, stand-up routine fodder at worst. Apple's doomed Newton fell faster in the marketplace than even gravity would have predicted, and companies like Psion and General Magic struggled with earning acceptance for their designs...
...Kinnell read as part of the Wordsworth Presents series. Hall and Kinnell are two very different poets, in style and in their range of concerns; but in addition to sharing a publisher, their poems share a conversational tone that at times makes them sound like a monologue or a stand-up routine. The poems in both of their new books are largely free-form, unmetered, anecdotal and sometimes jokey; in other words, perfect for reading aloud to an audience, especially an audience that hasn't read them before...
When "The Old Life's" interest doesn't lie in local reference, it often comes from a kind of humor that is closely related to stand-up comedy. Hall, an experienced reader who turns each poem into an expert performance piece, drew big laughs with poems about Steven's swearing, and about a literary game he played in college, "The Giant Broom." But while these pieces are funny, they are not necessarily poetry; remove the line breaks and you have simply an anecdote. In other words, if T.S. Eliot's poetry was stylistically artificial and thematically impersonal, and Robert Lowell...