Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then luck struck. Director James Cameron cast him in what could have been a no-impact supporting role in True Lies. Thanks in part to his sly, scene-stealing comic turn as Arnold Schwarzenegger's loud, loutish best friend, the movie was boffo in 1994 ($146 million gross). Arnold instantly became one of filmdom's most wanted second bananas--a kind of low-rent Tony Randall for the age of Beavis...
...while bartending in Minneapolis, he opened the show for a visiting comic named Roseanne Barr. She needed jokes, and he wrote enough that worked, so she kept asking. Five years later, she invited him to move to Los Angeles to provide material for her new TV series and play an occasional supporting role. The professional rapport got personal, but Roseanne refused to marry Tom until he checked into rehab to break a growing, even life-threatening dependency on alcohol and cocaine...
Arnold's nervousness may have another source: his sense that show-biz careers wane more easily than they wax. "Good things don't always last," he says. "Even great stars like Schwarzenegger have had some very rough spots in their lives and their careers." The stand-up comic who went from Mr. Roseanne to Mr. Who? has more reason than most to heed that lesson--even from the top of the heap...
...illustrate: when Drake revisits his homeland, he finds skinheads and old aristocrats smelling of mothballs and sauerkraut eager to make him King of Hungary. Fortunately, the possibility is more comic than cautionary. Drake recoils at the thought of honoring his "curse of identity." So does Hungary, which, despite its share of popular reactionaries and Codrescu's imaginative efforts, is holding on to the beginnings of an enterprising democracy. A Blood Countess II might update the author's fears with a female descendant of Elizabeth Bathory who builds an international cosmetics empire with beauty products based on an old family formula...
Hiaasen, a columnist for the Miami Herald, is a funny fellow who regards human Floridians as a notch below palmetto bugs in matters of ethics and compassion. His new crime novel about South Florida, the sixth in a very good run, is caustic and comic. The author's method hasn't varied since the first, Tourist Season: turn over a rock and watch in glee and honest admiration as those little rascals squirm in the light...