Word: funnier
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...concert film Raw, Eddie Murphy does a mean impression of Cosby -- sputtering, paternal, obsessively self-censoring -- and it is funnier than anything the real Cosby manages in Leonard Part 6. It is almost funnier than anything else in Raw. As Cosby is to television, Murphy is to movies: the undisputed popular champ. Cos plays the good father, Eddie the adorable, rank- mouthed boy. And Murphy is more: a gifted mimic with explosive sexual charisma. That's what gives the Beverly Hills Cop films their sleek, self- satisfied zing. But 90 minutes of Murphy, prowling the stage in duds of black...
Boller and Davis seem to have mined every shiny nugget in the Hollywood Hills. Could any screenwriter have written funnier lines, for instance, than those of Lewis J. Selznick, one of the pioneer moguls? A victim of anti- Semitism in his native Russia, Selznick nonetheless had a forgiving nature. When Czar Nicholas II was deposed in 1917, he sent him a cable: "When I was a poor boy in Kiev some of your policemen were not kind to me . . . stop I came to America and prospered stop now hear with regret you are out of a job . . . stop feel...
...seeming stupid. As the buttoned-down businessman who takes up with her, says he can forgive her slightly checkered past and then finds he cannot, Ken Land is more likable and believable than his Broadway counterpart. As a result, what is virtually an identical show plays louder, faster and funnier -- to cite Centenarian Director George Abbott's hallowed instructions to performers -- and also seems more true. It is as bubbly and brisk and bittersweet as Broadway, at home or on the road, is always supposed...
Durang has written parodies before; in his History of the American Film and his Idiots Karamazov (written with Albert Innaturato) he relied exclusively on the form. But in each of those cases he used familiar cultural images as springboards to more important--and funnier--issues. This latest offering manages only to stick small pins in some very easy targets; it is a series of in-jokes about the theater that amounts to just a series of in-jokes about the theater. The heavyhanded production does not help; only Elizabeth Franz manages to find the right kind of placid earnestness...
...vulgar social climber, a tiresome, self-absorbed frump who just happens to be a medium with the gift of raising the dead. Her manner is so much the grasping fraud that the audience is stunned when she delivers the goods. Indeed, she is stunned herself: there are few funnier sights than Page striding across the stage in pursuit of a ghost whose presence she senses but cannot see, snuffling at the wraith's ectoplasm like a spaniel who just knows a squirrel is somewhere nearby...