Word: cheech
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
STONED PEOPLE WILL laugh at almost anything. You can make them giggle by stumbling around, and crack them up completely by falling down. Comedy team Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong are clearly counting on the undiscerning tastes of high audiences to save their new movie, Up in Smoke, from the outright failure it deserves. The ads for the movie warn you not to go "straight" to see this movie, but if you have any semblance of rational thought left in your head by the time you hit the theater you'll undoubtedly look around and wonder why you wasted good...
...that dope and all that goes with it is not potentially funny--far from it. Yet Cheech and Chong, who wrote as well as starred in the movie, just don't seem to know how to tap the possible sources of humor. The laughs are too easy, too cheap, too shallow--it seems as if they got high one day and wrote up the movie in a couple of hours, but forgot to double check and see if it was funny when they regained their normal states of consciousness. All the obvious jokes are there--people stumbling around, people eating...
...come paying high theater prices expecting to see a play, who are shocked and involuntarily titillated by the uninhibited use of words they have only read in print and even then disguised by asterisks. But for a generation of college students nurtured on National Lampoon, Lenny Bruce and Cheech & Chong, The London Madhouse Company despite all the hyperbolic publicity, will seem quite tame and a bit on the dreary side...
...most successful of the rock comics are Richard ("Cheech") Marin, 27, and Tommy Chong, 33, an energetic Chicano-Chinese duo whose freakish cast of characterizations includes Sister Mary Elephant, Ashley Roachclip, and Buster the Body Crab. Their first two albums have sold 4 million copies so far, and their newest, Los Cochinos, jumped onto the pop charts at 22, a feat usually accomplished only by top rockers. But several others are stalking comedy's new-found rock audience in their wake...
When these elements are used as tools of comic construction, the results can be splendid parody, as in Cheech & Chong's TV quiz-show takeoff Let's Make a Dope Deal, "where young pushers try to parlay their stash into the reely big connection and move up into dealerhood." Unfortunately, the dope and dirty words too often seem intended to be funny in themselves, giggling passwords to separate "us" from "them...