Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...quick to laughter and tears, Prince Norodom Sihanouk was bursting with both. An Air China jetliner from Beijing had just brought him home to Phnom Penh after a tortuous personal odyssey of nearly 13 years. For all the flag waving and jasmine petals that greeted him, though, the return last week of Cambodia's exiled former head of state brought no certain end to his homeland's generation-long nightmare. The Sino-Soviet rivalry that had helped drive Cambodia's civil war may be history. U.N. troops and officials may have arrived to help restore peace. But the seeds...
Hughes similarly brings out the ironies of the script, often without speaking. With active eyebrows and lips pursed to suppress laughter, he successfully reminds the audience of the world outside Tilghman County. His character's growth from introvert to boisterous raconteur is believable in spite of its rapidity...
...plots (Marcia tries to juggle two dates for the same night, then gets bopped on the nose by a football), the inane dialogue ("I think your problem isn't a swollen nose," says Dad to Marcia, "it's a bruised conscience"), the musical punctuation marks, even spurts of canned laughter. It is, depending on your point of view, either a tribute to a classic piece of TV kitsch or the End of Theater As We Know...
...Does any courageous person have a friend with a question?" she asked, to the laughter of the audience...
Leguizamo is, in fact, part of a wave of young minority comedians who use laughter to lampoon ethnic and other stereotypes, often at the risk of offending fellow minorities. Damon and Keenen Ivory Wayans have widened the parameters of black humor on their TV show In Living Color, enacting such caricatures as dogmatic homeboys, bums and effeminate book reviewers. Stand-up comedian Tamayo Otsuki revs up her act by portraying the Japanese as greedy moneybags who discipline their children by evoking memories of the atom bomb. ) Such humor, argues Leguizamo, is an "exorcism" rooted in the liberating power of self...