Word: comedian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Rachel Sweet is a baby-voiced comedian with jet-black hair piled high in a ponytail that makes her look like Pebbles Flintstone. She used to sing in a + new-wave rock band and now studies art history at Columbia University. But starting this week, she will be spending her evenings curled up on a sofa in a Manhattan TV studio, making wisecracks about the single life in New York City. Typical bit: Rachel charts the differences between a guy she dated named David Sims and former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. "Has fancy cigarette holder. F.D.R.: yes. Sims: no. Tried...
Whether the motif is jazz or swing, classical or ragtime, there is one constant in the films of Woody Allen: good music sets both the mood and the pace. The meticulous attention to scoring is no coincidence. Comedian Allen is deadly earnest when it comes to music, especially the New Orleans jazz style he favors most...
...Woody Allen has spent every Monday night on this bandstand. He even skipped the 1978 Academy Awards, where he won an Oscar for Annie Hall, in order to play his regular gig in midtown Manhattan. Why does a man who has had such a successful career as a writer, comedian, actor and filmmaker feel a compulsion to go out and play the clarinet once a week? Certainly not for the money -- he refuses to accept a cent for playing. Nor is it for self-promotion -- he insists that his appearances not be advertised and has repeatedly turned down offers...
That quip was uncharacteristic of a man who scrupulously separates the clarinetist from the comedian and never tells a joke on the bandstand: when Woody is playing jazz, he's all stick and no shtick. Not that funny things haven't happened in connection with Woody's music. When he and his New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra first got together in the early '70s, they were summarily ejected from the first few clubs they played in because their music was so noncommercial. At one establishment, the band was fired in the middle of a particularly lugubrious spiritual, after...
Mason's case is indicative of a larger truth. The context of humor--and not the intent of the comedian or some inherent quality of the joke--primarily determines what is funny and what is inappropriate...