Word: deadpan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...onstage, the Cramps were spectacular. Interior could stoke a crowd with writhing and pogo-ing that made Iggy Pop look like a folksinger, and when he opened his mouth to deadpan songs like "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," he could make the crowd laugh too. Perhaps the Cramps' most perfect performance was a 1978 concert at the Napa State Mental Hospital in California. "Somebody told me you people are crazy," Lux screamed from the stage, "but I'm not so sure about that...
Celebrity Autobiography Joan Lunden's wake-up routine. Neil Sedaka's food diary. The Burt Reynolds--Loni Anderson divorce--from both sides. These and other excerpts from star memoirs are read off-Broadway with deadpan glee by a rotating cast in the funniest docu-theater stunt of the year...
...Even for centrists, conservatives and members of the Alaskan Independence Party, the Election Guide has high entertainment value because Moore is such a fun guy to argue with. Like Rush Limbaugh in his early years, he keeps you alert by mixing humor-tinged facts with deadpan fancy. (Why is Moore not on talk radio?) For example, he posits that the citizens of Iowa and New Hampshire, the first people to decide who the President will be, are actually extraterrestrial replicants of locals kidnapped in 1957. Anti-immigrationists should know that our leaders are being chosen by aliens...
...Coens are deadpan pranksters; editing their pictures under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes is just the mildest of their jokes. So it's entirely possible that Burn After Reading is some multifilm concept comedy--that No Country for Old Men was a feature-length diversionary tactic from the Coens' strategy of trying the patience of their most dedicated admirers. They started with that aimless farce The Ladykillers and bring the geste to fruition with their latest enervating caper. If this is so, they've managed a pretty complex joke, and it's on you. Too bad it isn't funny...
...Hirst's gift, when it's with him, is for black comedy, William Hogarth meets Stanley Kubrick - work that's part deadpan joke, part dead serious utterance about mortality and decay. The piece that first made him famous, an open-jawed shark in a tank of formaldehyde titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, offered a giant beast of prey as a belligerent correlative for a universally suppressed anxiety. A Thousand Years is a large glass box in which real maggots hatch into flies that appear to feed on blood (actually red sugar water) from...