Word: clifton
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sitcom Taxi whose salutation "Tenk you veddy much" became a national catchphrase. But a small cult of hard-core fans reveres Kaufman as a performance artist who upended stand-up comedy to explore his inner child. He wrestled women for laughs, created a thuggish alter ego named Tony Clifton and never let on where the prankster stopped and the real person began. When he died of cancer in 1984, at 35, even close friends suspected a hoax...
...film somewhat scants Kaufman's only widely popular success, as Latka, the "foreign man" of Taxi. But all his other creations are here in full: the Mighty Mouse lip syncher, the Elvis impersonator, the wrestler who challenged women in the audience. And, of course, Tony Clifton, the hostile Las Vegas lounge singer. Carrey is easy in all those guises but never frantic for our favor. He gives a wonderfully disciplined performance...
...favorite of Kaufman's) to a bizarre Jim Carrey/R.E.M. duet to the film's score, also composed by R.E.M. Some of the numbers are absolutely baffling, especially a whacked-out version of disco standard "I Will Survive," sung by Jim Carrey as one of Kaufman's alter-egos, Tony Clifton...
...Senate seat. But it sounds as if he is hearing the same voices Hillary does when she talks to Eleanor Roosevelt. A Ouija board would be a more reliable source for prognostications, but make sure the board is on a table that has been bolted down. BRUCE L. WILLIAMSON Clifton Park...
...feel lucky having spent 17 years in the company of CLIFTON ("Kip") FADIMAN at the Book-of-the-Month Club, learning from him how to read. Bearing witness to his reports--he wrote one on every book he read for the club--and his discussions at the monthly meeting of the judges was like taking the world's best creative writing course. He was a humane critic, seldom unkind, with few foibles. (I once did hear him say, "Faulkner makes me giggle.") The books he loved most were those that bore two Fadiman standards: lucidity and a mind at work...