Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...whose size and ardor would thrill a rock star. In sold-out Madison Square Garden, he looks like a samurai biker, with Brando's pout, Elvis' sideburns and a sequined jacket, its back stitched with the phrase DICE RULES. And he does too. He is America's rajah of comic raunch, ready to beguile fans who dress like him and talk like him and who have memorized his earlier routines from hit records and HBO specials. "I know you know the old s," he slurs between drags on a cigarette. "But it's a new decade...
This production of A Midsummer Night's Dream's greatest flaw, however, is that it sometimes overdoes its interpretative staging. The comic-book touches, such as the "zap" that fairies cry after magic mutterings, are almost too cute. The result is funny but cheap...
...answering this question, the play takes off in all sorts of comic directions. There are phone calls to the playwright himself incorporating a tape recorded voice that sounds pretty much like Woody Allen, and an appearance by Blanche DuBois, followed by Groucho Marx and a messenger from Western Union. All these arbitrary appearances serve to make the play a bizarre and entertaining satire of drama in general...
Sturges should have written Hecht's biography; he loved brash charlatans and made comic art of their deceptions. Hecht should have written Sturges'; he would have wrung high irony from the story of a gallivanting rich boy who grew up to be the top writer-director in pictures. And one of the blithest. "All I do is wave a little wand a little," purred the orchestra conductor in Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours, "and out comes the music." For five glorious years, 1940-44, Sturges waved his wand and out came words and pictures. Nothing but Hollywood's most distinctive satires...
...16th century Chinese comic novel Journey to the West, a motley group of pilgrims, at the end of a magical, sometimes terrifying quest, arrive at the Western Paradise of Buddha to receive sacred books imparting enlightenment. To their chagrin, they discover that in order to secure their prize, they must grease the palms of Buddha's disciples. Buddha himself is rather condescending. Paradise has turned out to be less than perfect and more than a little disconcerting. What was it they set out to find, and why is it yet to be found? Even as their numbers and their influence...