Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Duddy's most elaborate schemes: hiring a perennially drunken and pompous British film maker in exile to make bar mitzvah movies for doting parents. The film maker is played by Denholm Elliott, who is hilariously disheveled and polluted nearly past the point of pretension, a characterization of enormous comic skill. His bar mitzvah production is a triumphant, unconscious (on his part) parody combining the most tiresome features of the anthropological and popular front documentaries of another time. Beethoven's Fifth provides the musical score, Elliott himself the pompous narration, holding together shots of the ceremony itself, African puberty...
...weighing factors they had not given real attention to before, such as considering women for outside sales jobs." Realizing that women's own attitudes may block their progress, Boyle and Kirkman also conduct awareness sessions among female employees. After one session at Hercules, a woman echoed the comic-strip character Pogo: "We have seen the enemy, and it is us." Should Boyle and Kirkman succeed completely in changing the male attitude toward women workers, they would put themselves out of their present business. But they are not worried; they figure it will take at least a decade for women...
...show biz obsessed. He met Carrie Nye McGeoy, his future wife, while acting in a New Haven amateur production. After graduation he hung around Broadway theaters, cadged a job with Jack Paar as a jokesmith, wrote for Johnny Carson and tried his own nightclub act as a stand-up comic...
...critic Goldman brilliantly conveys his reckoning of Bruce as a kind of artistic genius who falls outside of all high-brow categories. Bruce was a great stand-up comic, a vital master of the "spritz." But the "spritz" belongs in what is called "popular culture"; it is urban folk art. Bruce is an urban American primitive, a Jewish Leadbelly. And besides Goldman such folk art hasn't yet enlisted too many serious students. Goldman has staked out a new region that promises to be a "field of the future" among scholars and critics. Through his magazine articles and essays...
...enthusiasm let alone Winnie's. Despite Hamlin's excellent job, the show is not all that exciting. 90-minute monologues, which is essentially what Beckett has to offer, are hard to make theatrically charging and this production at the Loeb does not meet the challenge The play has its comic moments, which director George Hamlin exploits to the hilt, but it is also awfully depressing--making it all the more painful to watch...