Word: joke
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...skill is equal to his ambition. Once again he has turned a daffy concept for a novel into a stimulating display of wit, erudition, humanity and narrative force. He weaves his diverse strands with cunning and charm and adroitly sustains suspense in what could easily have been a one-joke story. Part of his persuasive technique is an absolutely deadpan, matter-of-fact tone. Another part is the structure of the book as mystery, in which events are explained long after they happen...
Shepard, premier playwright and matinee idol, fits the cowpoke boots just fine, but he is too snaky and controlled to play a tortured loser. Basinger remains an in-joke of Hollywood casting directors; 46 other American actresses could have made some emotional sense out of May, or at least sent her smoldering in mystery. Stanton, with his haunted, pinched face and chirruping alibis, steals the show--or, rather, is awarded it by default. And Randy Quaid, as a gentleman caller, is a perfect audience surrogate: decent, dogged, perplexed by a family squabble that admits no strangers to its terrible embrace...
...Welcome to the Club Fed." That is the line rock musicians lay on each other these days when they arrive at the Plant Studios, a rock-'n'-roll recording facility in Sausalito, Calif. The reason for their nervous joke is that the Plant is owned by the U.S. Government. Federal marshals seized the studio in September after its owner was accused of buying the establishment with money from drug manufacturing. The Plant, which has recorded platinum albums for such artists as Stevie Wonder and Fleet-wood Mac, is considered one of the country's ten best studios and rents...
Dolnick reminds us that the most famous artworks have a way of turning up, although sometimes not for years. Meanwhile, they can make appearances in surprising places. There's even an art-world in joke in Dr. No, the 1962 film that introduces James Bond. On a wall of the evil doctor's Caribbean hideaway, you can spot Goya's portrait The Duke of Wellington, famously stolen the year before from the National Gallery in London. So far, though, there is no sign of The Scream version taken last year, not even in the movies. --By Richard Lacayo
...would you want to hear the joke told over and over, for 90 minutes, by scores of comics? The surprise is: yes. The Aristocrats smartly varies its pace, with iterations by the old (George Carlin), the female (Whoopi Goldberg), the pranksters (Penn and Teller) and the deeply weird (Andy Dick). Also wordlessly (by Billy the Mime), as a card trick (by Eric Mead) and as a cartoon (by the South Park guys). The result is a master class in comedy, in all its cruel, larkish, obsessive creativity...