Word: latkas
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...Cohen does - Chance the Gardener, the blank slate in Being There who provokes all those around him to expose themselves in some way. And then there's the other comic who was routinely described as a performance artist: Andy Kaufman. For starters, Borat owes a thing or two to Latka, the Ruritanian innocent that Kaufman played on Taxi. More important, Baron Cohen's approach calls to mind those Kaufman routines - though routine is the wrong word for anything he did - in which he deliberately set out to bore and bewilder his audiences, just to see what would happen...
...fish-out-of-water concept has been abused by enough sitcoms to make you dread seafood. But this series, about Raja, a Pakistani Muslim exchange student (Adhir Kalyan) who befriends his suburban host family's nerdy son (Dan Byrd), is fresh, good-hearted and totally winning. Like Taxi's Latka Gravas and Alf's title alien, the earnest Raja is a foreign power you'll surrender to from sheer laughter...
...film somewhat scants Kaufman's only widely popular success, as Latka, the "foreign man" of Taxi. But all his other creations are here in full: the Mighty Mouse lip syncher, the Elvis impersonator, the wrestler who challenged women in the audience. And, of course, Tony Clifton, the hostile Las Vegas lounge singer. Carrey is easy in all those guises but never frantic for our favor. He gives a wonderfully disciplined performance...
DIED. Andy Kaufman, 35, quirky comedian who antagonized as many audiences as he delighted with his bizarre brand of humor; of lung cancer (although he was never a smoker); in Los Angeles. From 1978 to 1983, Kaufman played the childlike mechanic Latka Gravas on television's Taxi, but he was more celebrated for his stand-up acts and concert appearances in which he wrestled women, impersonated Elvis Presley and sleazy nightclub crooners, and sang the tedious camp song One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall almost all the way through. He seemed to relish putting audiences...
...David Lloyd. The Taxi characters were so much like us, and so good at it. The Sunshine Cab Co. was a place to work in that became a place to live in. And your co-workers became your friends: Alex the off-duty rabbi, and sweet dim Tony, and Latka the gentle schizoid. And Reverend Jim, phoning in his blissed-out wisdom from Planet X. And Elaine, the only woman, who desperately wanted to be somewhere else but couldn't leave the place she knew as home...