Word: comic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...stars are the animals: Kermit, the pure and reasonable frog; the ineffable Miss Piggy, every circumferential inch a lady; Rowlf the Dog, a philosophical pianist; Fozzie Bear, the can't-stand-up comic; and The Great Gonzo, the magnificently inferior creature whose inventors insist, despite damning evidence, that he is not a turkey. Monsters are the remaining important category of beings: such enormities as Sweetums, who is about 9 ft. tall and covered with a three-day growth of brownish shag, and Thog, who is a good deal bigger and still growing, lend chaos to the goings...
...style is not frenzied-he is notably calm, in fact-but it is unusually intense. It suits a man widely deferred to as a wizard, but it would not do, say, for a renowned comic performer, a wisecracking green frog. And the curious truth about this gaunt, bearded, rather ascetic-looking craftsman, as he admits, is that "my nature is not particularly witty." He is funny only with Kermit on his arm, and the same thing seems to be true of Frank Oz and the other Muppet people...
...piece about Watergate literature, for instance, he speaks of "the firm jaw and the empty sentence. Any good comic writer can do you a Sam Ervin, but How ard Baker is a work of art." Examining the predicament of fiction writers in an age when all psychological twitches are resentlessly understood, he observes: "Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it any more. A few rap sessions, some fearless touch ing, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and lago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet...
...heroine is defined more by brand names (Gucci, Mercedes, Perrier) than emotions or intellect. There are only silly plot devices to motivate her on-again, off-again affair with the street-kid hero, Strip. Tom lin has so little to work with that she falls back on fey comic mannerisms and, finally, phony swoons and sighs. It is the first time that this usually empathetic actress has stood completely outside the character she is playing. Instead of creating a latter-day version of Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson, she comes across like a somnambulant Elaine...
...factory. After much tool-dropping and other displays of incompetence, the job ends with Falk hiding in a room full of chickens, only to be hauled off to jail by a feather-covered cop. Undaunted, the hero emerges six years later, worried only about catching up on his back comic-book reading and planning more jobs...