Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...spoof of every major scene in the original film, interrupted by the tangents of Brooks's imagination and concluded by a resounding coda. Wilder alternates moments of deadpan lucidity with the sudden spasms of pure manic fury that characterize the egotist/neurotic. He turns ordinary comic ineptitude into a thoroughly debilitating frenzy that intensifies as the dire experiment proceeds; the riotous heights of the film...
...first part of the book, which is devoted to Prince's earlier experiences on Broadway, tends to be boring. Prince dissects one production after another, and they all begin to sound alike--find the love interest, the comic relief, figure out what will sell. There are few anecdotes, and, although there are quite a lot of names, few characters. If Prince had concentrated more on only one or two productions, carefully analyzing the dynamics of the collective creative process that lay behind a particular play, he might have provided some more insight into the way a hit musical is mounted...
...Comedian Jack Benny the pauses were always more eloquent than the gags. When he died last week of cancer, Benny had become the grand master of comic timing; like Playwrights Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, he had built a career around silence...
...there was another Jack Benny -less comic but considerably more generous. It was that trouper who traversed the country, raising some $6 million for America's leading orchestras. Thank yous were always abruptly dismissed. "Soloing with Leonard Bernstein," he liked to claim, "is like being on a desert island with Zsa Zsa Gabor and her boy friend. You feel you're not needed...
SCAPINO. The incredibly nimble Jim Dale joins that select pantheon of comic agility, men like Bobby Clark, Bert Lahr, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, who clowned in flawless body English...