Word: cutup
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...unlikely to change from blue jeans into a suit or trade in his Dodge van for a Mercedes. Nor is he likely to drop the role of the eternal cutup. "I'll have the grilled baby chicken," he said last week as he sat down for an interview in a Santa Monica restaurant. "And the cuter the better...
Right now she is the world's most popular chanteuse. Her album True Blue quickly went triple platinum; her Papa Don't Preach single did time at No. 1. In her new movie she co-stars with Husband Sean Penn, that terrific actor and legendary cutup. Last winter, when the newlyweds made the film, they also made headlines on every tabloid front page. There would seem to be a bit of "want see" here. And yet MGM, the distributor of Shanghai Surprise, has drop-kicked it into the marketplace like a turkey carcass...
...humor. You have to see the light side . . . If something is pressuring me, I have to get rid of it. I have to scream or yell or punch a bag." Fine, but maybe Connections should include a disclaimer, just to be safe. Something like "Warning: McMahon is a professional cutup. Do not attempt to follow all these instructions in your own home...
...face had a cartoon-like directness: big mustache, Magic Marker eyebrows, oversize cigar. Yet few TV entertainers were a more intriguing set of contradictions than Ernie Kovacs. A boisterous cutup who relished tacky props and low-down slapstick, yet a closet highbrow who orchestrated comedy to Bartok and Beethoven. A talk-show pioneer, yet the creator of a classic half an hour that included not a single line of dialogue. A TV "star" who never had a network series that lasted more than two seasons, yet who influenced video comedy for the next two decades, from Laugh-In to David...
...performers dig beneath this mannerism to suggest years of buried sorrow. Nancy Marchand, as the family's self-described cutup, has the gift of making banal observations sound witty. Anne Pitoniak, as the eldest and prissiest, combines dictatorial will with genuine dignity. Peggy Cass is the family entertainer, Elizabeth Franz its happiest housewife and Gisela Caldwell its edgy protofeminist, whose eventual crack-up seems to result from her discontent with women's lot. The most affecting performance comes from Bette Henritze, as a stroke victim whose singsong speech does not obscure a larger tragedy. When she admits...