Word: laughed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...erroneous statement?" Jokes Garrick: "I just did when I said 'subjective reality.' " Adler takes the idea a step further. "Let me give you an example of an erroneous statement: There are three mountains on the Eastern Shore of Maryland more than 5,000 feet high." The students laugh at such an absurd notion. Poking the same index finger on the table, Adler draws the distinction precisely. "A lie," he says, "is the difference between what you say and what you think; an erroneous statement is the difference between what you think and what there...
Norman Lear TV sitcoms have made metropolitan racial melanges like this into laugh material for a more sophisticated and cynical generation. But growing up in the real situation, in a New York neighborhood where racial barriers were as inflexible as foreign borders, the laughs did not come easy. "I felt like I was being punished, cut off," Jeffreys remembers. "It made me lonely." And scared of the sound of his stepfather's foot on the stair...
Steve Martin filters laugh-a-minute zaniness through Redford good looks: goy meets Berle. Mull intones mantras of malevolent banality. Tomlin incarnates sorority queens and shopping-bag ladies with the intensity of Piaf and the emotional range of either Hepburn. Brooks works the baroque side of the street. Kaufman's characters populate a doll's house of the bizarre. They are as different from one another as bright young people can be. But they share a basic belief-that the business of America is show business -and a fascination with the detritus of the entertainment industry. Steve Allen...
...Janus face of Don Rickles. To the post-funny comics, all the world's a cramped stage in a seedy Newark bar, and all the men and women -onstage or off-merely sweaty-palmed buffoons following the dog act. With devastating acuity, the post-funny comics evoke these laugh-cadging mendicants of the entertainment industry. And because the post-funnies are superb deadpan actors, their exaggeration has the gritty kick of a Fred Wiseman documentary. One does not titter so much as cringe...
...doesn't hurt to make people laugh," says Albert Brooks of Kaufman. "There should be laughter. Otherwise it's some other art form." If Kaufman functions as a one-man Weather Underground, Brooks is a more accessible, ultimately more subversive radical professor of post-funny comedy. Says Brooks, who was born Albert Einstein, son of the dialect comedian Parkyakarkus: "Life is so bizarre anyway, the slightest twist can make it really funny." Brooks' twist is so slight, so deft, that many may not get the joke. In 1975 he and Harry Shearer wrote and produced A Star...