Word: comicality
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Watching Bell there, I found it easy to see his appeal to the young. He delivers stand-up-style monologues, not three-point sermons. Comic riffs alternate with seemingly naive questions--Letterman crossed with NPR'S Ira Glass--until Bell tightens the rhetorical noose and produces tears or thoughtful silence. His stagecraft is legendary. To illustrate a passage from Leviticus on sacrifice, Bell brought on a live goat, which he released--underlining Jesus' role as the last and greatest sin offering--intoning, "The goat has left the building...
Eulogy from a Colleague Thanks for acknowledging the career of comic Marilyn Martinez [Nov. 26]. She was embraced by the Latino/Latina comedy community, and thank goodness for that. But before she made her way to Los Angeles, she was based in Denver, where she was widely accepted by women and by the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community. I was her comedy partner from 1977 to 1980. Marilyn got laughs for some raunchy material but was also political and avant-garde. We played throughout the U.S., and I'm glad to know that her work with me supported her subsequent...
...father, Stanley Johnson, an environmentalist and former Member of the European Parliament, calls this "the fight against crooks and nannies looking into nooks and crannies." Like son, like father. Both Johnsons make a humor pit stop every few minutes. But, says Johnson senior, beneath the comic exterior, his son has "a solid, philosophical outlook" and a "real, substantial core of belief...
...first to take pop culture into serious consideration. Now I'm sometimes under the impression that intellectuals are too concerned with popular culture. As soon as you learn about low culture, you become so fascinated by it that you become a member of the sect. You discover that comic books have a language of their own, and even though you were an intellectual before, you become a worshipper of comic books...
...played a great drunk on TV's Bewitched and a range of comic characters on sitcoms like Hogan's Heroes and The Bob Newhart Show. But any baby boomer knows comedic character actor Dick Wilson as Mr. Whipple, the beleaguered grocer in toilet-paper ads who begs of customers, "Please don't squeeze the Charmin." The iconic ad campaign, which ran from 1964 to 1985, rocketed Wilson into pop-culture history--and national fame. "Everybody says, 'Where did they find you?'" the veteran actor told a reporter in 1985. "I say I was never lost...