Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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WHAT HAPPENED WAS THIS by Josh Greenfeld (Carroll & Graf; $18.95). This zesty comic novel about a young man's climb from Catskills waiter to Hollywood film director who testifies against his left-wing friends during the McCarthy era could have been called What Makes Sammy...
...gallery. Mob movies are gathering, like capos at the Appalachia conference, from all over America. You want Italian-American hoods of the New York City stripe? We got 'em by the hundreds in GoodFellas. In My Blue Heaven, written by Pileggi's wife Nora Ephron as a kind of comic coda to the Scorsese picture, Steve Martin plays a Mafia rat in a Witness Protection Program out West. At Christmas, Paramount has The Godfather Part III, a climax to the gangland Nibelungen Ring, starring Al Pacino, Diane Keaton and a cast of many Coppolas...
Classic British mysteries generally fit into one of three categories: the puzzle, or whodunit; the psychological study, or whydunit; and the comic jape. Robert Barnard and Reginald Hill have each written deft examples of all three. In their newest and most ambitious works, they adroitly fuse the subgenres together to paint rich, if characteristically jaundiced, social panoramas of decaying industrial towns. Both offer the teasing pleasures of suspense, sly misdirection and a breakneck climax as police seek to avert bloody murder. $ Both feature a gallery of vivid characters. And both take on themes ostensibly belonging to serious literature...
...which has been wooed so successfully over the past few years by the Fox network, MTV and other competitors. NBC has come up with hip-hopping shows like Ferris Bueller and Fresh Prince of Bel Air. CBS is trying to get the youngsters who flocked to the theaters for comic-book extravaganzas like Batman to tune in for a lavishly produced fantasy series, The Flash. (Unfortunately, the show has been scheduled in the Thursday-night death slot, opposite The Cosby Show and The Simpsons...
...ankles; he's a writer who seems happiest when he's listening to old records on his stereo, to nostalgic '60s music. The yuppie backlash comes into sharpest focus in CBS's sitcom Lenny. The head of this TV family is a blue-collar worker (played by stand-up comic Lenny Clarke) who grumbles like a 1990-model Ralph Kramden about everything from money troubles to his wife's use of yuppie buzz words. "Quality time?" he snaps. "You been watching thirtysomething again...