Word: jape
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This could be a tiresome jape. Making fun of show-biz effluvia has become the easiest, sleaziest way to get a laugh and feel superior. Even cut-rate exploitation movies can possess a delirious visionary gran-deur that makes any sarcasm directed their way seem small-minded. But the MST3K gang have gone far beyond Golden Turkey Awards. For this clever crowd, inept movies are mere cues to asides on politics and society, which they attack with scimitar wit. The show can even be seen as a branch of semiological (and semi-illogical) studies. "I've always been interested...
...boys of music. They slowed down when Musicians Union boss James V. Petrillo imposed a two- year ban on union members' making records, but they hit the top spot in late '44, when their impudent version of Cocktails for Two sold two million records. Four years later, the holiday jape All I Want for Christmas (My Two Front Teeth) sold 1.5 million copies in six weeks. Jones cinched his renown with a high-rated radio show and an exhaustive skein of one-night stands. Chester Gould and Al Kapp put him into their comic strips. Movies and TV beckoned...
...back to their hotel in a school bus. Other beautiful people got to exercise their cynicism. One dissed the Tennessee Ball: "It was like every bad wedding you've ever been to rolled into one." Hillary's dowdy hat and Republican-style cloth coat were subjected to many a jape: "She'll be the first Casual Corner First Lady." How very catty the talk was, and how very '50s. Listen up: the woman is just too hip to bother trying to be chic...
...were trying to wipe a rag across their windshield. Brooks' old colleague Gene Wilder has fared no better with Another You, in which he plays a compulsive liar coupled in a complex scam with con man Richard Pryor. On its second weekend of release, this mediocre jape averaged a pathetic $262 per screen; that's about 50 people in each theater all weekend. With those numbers, a moviemaker can go broke, and an usher can get awfully lonely...
...that lofty jape suggests, Beyond the Boom's writers are not above a few slap shots and kidney punches. The anthology's contributors, for the most part, are stronger on aphorism and assertion than on analysis. They also indulge in an awful lot of navel gazing, often in a tone of self-satisfied righteousness; witness Dana Mack's account of being brave and lonely as a student at San Francisco's Lowell High School. The book's two essays on film, by Bruce Bawer and John Podhoretz, seem tendentious and repetitive...