Word: flips
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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JOHN BOORMAN'S Leo the Last also begins interestingly, if not well, with an overlaid rock song alluding to the action and some surreal flip-flopping between polite conversation and snide establishing narration, designed simultaneously to let the audience know the situation and to let it know it's being told deliberately. This low-level reflexiveness doesn't succeed in really challenging the naturalistic tradition...
Beetle Bailey, the comic strip dealing with the vicissitudes of a reluctant draftee, has never raised much of a chuckle from the Army. The official armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes refused to run it from 1954 to 1959 because it took too flip a view of Army brass. Last month Beetle was again banished by the paper's Pacific edition...
...Effortless. Flip eventually traded his khakis for a bellhop's uniform at San Francisco's Manor Plaza Hotel, where he made his nightclub debut playing a drunk. Soon he was hustling laughs in California saloons and slowly filling a loose-leaf notebook (which he still keeps) with his observations on comedy. Cardinal tenets in the Wilson canon: "Be interesting, be impassive, be effortless." Above all: "Make them remember Flip Wilson as a self-confident man of the world, projecting an 'I Don't Care If You Laugh' attitude...
...remembered all his own rules as he rendered his version of the discovery of America. Chris warns Isabella, "If I don't discover America, there ain't gonna BE no Ray Charles." Isabella then shrieks in the now-famous falsetto, "Chris gonna FIND Ray Charles." Since then Flip has sharpened and refined his style, which leans primarily on storytelling and body action rather than zingy punch lines. Even with all of the mugging, eye rolling and Negro dialect, Wilson's routines are inoffensive and totally devoid of racial rancor...
...notion that there is any significance in the fact that he is black. "Why does it have to be a question of black and white? I'm a comic, and my thoughts are reflected in what I do. I don't like to talk politics." But Flip tries to be more philosophical about his relationship with his audience. "I give an honest day's work, and I'm well paid for it. The guy who watches, suppose he's way down, or his wife is in the hospital. If I can take him away from...