Word: defiant
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What began as a defiant form of anti-shtik has become a dominant mode in the funny-peculiar '80s. It is saturating the big screen with the films of Albert Brooks (the mime), Steve Martin (funny balloon animals), Murray Langston (the paper-bagged Unknown Comic), Martin Mull (the Fernwood 2-Night talk-show host), Andy Kaufman (heterosexual wrestling), Lily Tomlin (Wayne Newton) and the now-ready-for-prime-time cutups of NBC's Saturday Night Live. It took over TV years ago-in 1975, when S.N.L. hit the air and became a focal point for the new comedy...
With those defiant words, issued at his union's 1976 convention in Las Vegas, Teamster Boss Frank E. Fitzsimmons underscored the brass-knuckles philosophy of union management that ruled supreme during his decade-long tenure as president of the U.S.'s largest trade union. Fitzsimmons' death last week in La Jolla, Calif, of lung cancer at age 73 makes room at the top of the 78-year-old International Brotherhood of Teamsters; the succession is not clear. But there seems little prospect that the union will change very much from what it was under the bluff...
Gorky's real name was Vosdanik Adoian. His father was a carpenter in Armenia, his mother the descendant of minor nobility and priests. He renamed himself as a defiant cosmetic gesture: "Arshile," he explained, was the Russian form of Achilles, and the writer Maxim Gorky was one of the current heroes of the Left...
...about as far as it goes. It's just not a form to arouse that sort of passion. If one employs Salvador Dali's Paranoid Critical Method, one starts suspecting that television's visceral meretriciousness is what we actually adore. In a medium populated by yahoos of the most defiant sort, the rest of us cannot help feeling like minor league aristocrats. Maybe we watch to make ourselves feel better. Maybe we watch to feel superior to the mob of Americans which lives "out there" somewhere--out in the Midwest probably...
...With this in mind, it comes as no surprise that when the camera follows Kazem and his wife to the Houston Astrodome, it pans across the stadium, filled with enthusiastic fans on their feet singing the National Anthem, and then focuses on Kazem, who remains seated, his face grimly defiant as the words "land of the free" echo through the stadium...