Word: humors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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MCKELLEN may be full of himself, full of more than the thespian's usually large share of bravado, but he is also full of Shakespeare and good humor. One of the highlights of the show comes when McKellen challenges the audience to find a single happy marriage in Shakespeare's canon--and shoots down every suggestion--from Othello and Desdemona to Brutus and Portia--with a few witty retorts. "Romeo and Juliet?" McKellen muses, "Short and sweet...
Author Carrie Fisher, the actress daughter of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, has been through drug problems of her own and gives her protagonist the kind of humor born from pain, anger and a strong will to live. The narrative voice is a bit like Holden Caulfield playing the Borscht Belt: "I'm a flash and the world is my pan." And: "I guess that's how guys are thoughtful in the '80s -- they accompany girls to their abortions." Postcards, which is really five connected vignettes, loses its bite when it strays from its emotional base in the clinic...
...comic's traditional adversary relationship to power and, instead, parade an anarchic childishness. Their banner might have read HELL, NO, WE WON'T GROW UP. In Britain, Monty Python's Flying Circus tossed music-hall bawdry into a Dada format, and at home National Lampoon updated sick humor with a stinging Wasp edge. They were vicious; they were silly; they couldn't care less. And now someone had to shatter the lulling cadences of stand-up too. Who better than the child of Disneyland and Wittgenstein...
...accomplished fact. In this show -- the first attempt by a U.S. museum at a conspectus of the subject -- Curator McShine has done a good job of setting out, in samples rather than full packages (55 artists are represented), the peculiar mix of political intelligence, sharp irony, antic humor, mythic yearnings, brusque self-doubt and curiously facile pictorial effects that helped define Berlin's cultural temper before Nazism and that came back, with many variations, after...
...Steven Wright, 31, is one of the few young comics to depart from the Carlin-Klein-Leno style of observational humor. His offbeat, cerebral routines are a string of absurdist one-liners, delivered in a deadpan monotone. Examples: "I was once arrested for walking in someone else's sleep." "When I die, I'm going to leave my body to science fiction." "I was walking through a forest and a tree fell right in front of me, and I didn't hear it." Like many comedians with a shtick, Wright (who grew up near Leno in Massachusetts and also...