Word: joking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...woman on the assembly line, into a keg of emotional dynamite. Kaurismaki's almost-silent movie features a cast of rats -- mother, stepfather, brutal beau -- for whom rat poison may be the best antidote. And for U.S. viewers, Match Factory is a splendid introduction to a world-class (no joke) filmmaker, with a wit as dry as kindling...
...cast and crew are entirely equal to the challenge of such an over-indulgent tale. They revel in the play. Modern productions of hardcore Elizabethan shlock tend to degenerate into a protracted joke at the expense of the crude plot. But Skin and Bone avoids this temptation. Rather than 100 minutes of dreary self-parody, the production flings itself into the play with gay abandon. Of course it still appears garish, over-the-top, even absurd; but it is not cast as simply worthless. The distinction may seem subtle, but it makes the difference between a snide exercise in self...
...Marines are worrying more about showers and mail. They have not had either since landing. But missing Christmas is their biggest gripe. They joke about the number of shopping days left and dare one another to swim home. U.S.M.C., they say, stands for "You Suckers Missed Christmas...
...Christmas Carol is emphatically not part of recent tradition at Seattle Repertory Theater. In fact, it has been a standing joke within the troupe that artistic director Daniel Sullivan always fills the holiday slot with some play involving suicide. So when he decided to do the ultimate "Bah, humbug!" and create a show mocking the Carols elsewhere, he wrote an offstage suicide into the script. That small self-indulgence is about the only inside joke in Inspecting Carol, a piece so accessible and hilariously funny that, to Sullivan's surprise, it is also being produced this holiday season by half...
...different show-business generations. Letterman, with his subversive antics and ironic attitude, does not so much act as host for a talk show as satirize talk shows. He is following a trail blazed by Carson, who introduced a self-parodying subtext. Carson's famous "savers" -- ad-libs to salvage jokes that bombed -- along with his conspiratorial asides to the audience during corny bits like Aunt Blabby and Carnac, were a way of making the comedian himself the butt of the joke...