Word: comic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Anyone who was on hand for Williams' stand up performance at the Lampoon Comedy Night two years ago will be well aware that his manic comedic talents are nothing short of inspired. In front of an audience the quiet, mild-mannered Williams of private life becomes transfigured into a comic dervish, wildly improvising on audience suggestions in a combination of ultra-free association and vocal impersonation that works quicker than the eye can catch...
Talk about your comebacks. This character was a star from the moment he was hatched in 1937. Through every comic humiliation that befell him -- whether getting vamped by a transvestite rabbit or fricasseed by an irate hunter -- he displayed the bravura resilience of a born loser. This master thespian could play an existential hero (Duck Amuck), a base canard (You Ought to Be in Pictures), a hard-breathing hoofer (Show Biz Bugs) or a World War II draft dodger (Draftee Daffy). Wily farceur, dynamite showman, he made 126 pictures before retiring in 1968. For years he could be seen only...
Daffy was not real, of course -- just a sheaf of drawings flipped past the eye at 24 frames per second. But the comic artistry of such directors as Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett made Daffy and the other denizens of the Warner Bros. cartoon barnyard seem as vivid as Sly Stallone and twice as funny. They surely seemed so to Greg Ford, a scholar-evangelist who has mounted cartoon retrospectives at museums and revival houses. Last year Warners hired him and Animator Terry Lennon to write and direct the little black duck's comeback vehicle...
...screen and a third, Steve Guttenberg, best known for fronting the Police Academy farces. The story -- of three roguish bachelors forced to care for an abandoned infant -- cradled few surprises and, for great barren stretches, got lost in a draggy drug plot. The film's direction had all the comic subtlety one would expect from that Merlin of mirth, Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy. Maybe the producers thought he was Doctor Spock...
...stage in duds of black and blue (just like his comedy), can wear thin when the text of his sermon is the cupidity of women and the stupidity of men. Richard Pryor, Murphy's stand- up role model, earned his right to obscene rage. In the younger, middle- class comic, anger seems a petulant pose. Like any sham evangelist, he can entertain without convincing. And even in this ragged turn, a viewer can do with Murphy's comedy what Murphy complains most women want to do with his immense fortune: take half...