Word: manic
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...breaks for a commercial. But the spice of the device is soon overwhelmed by Mama's overcooked material. The failure is not the fault of Lila Kaye, late of the Royal Shakespeare Company (she was Mrs. Squeers and Mrs. Crummies in Nich olas Nickleby). Kaye plays Mama with manic élan, but she is giving flesh - kilos of it - to an ethnic stereotype that should have gone out with the organ grinder and his monkey...
...deeper reaches, Fo's manic comedy is a splendid treatise on the mentality and mechanics of official lying. The play would have had hilarious pertinence if it had played Washington during the last months of the Nixon Administration. But Fo is examining something more sinister than Watergate ever was. Fo is thinking of a dark, sanctioned thuggery-the kind that kills-and of an endless manipulation of the record, the facts of the past dissolving and reforming themselves into new shapes, like that cloud that Hamlet and Polonius discussed. Certain psychological and moral circumstances, Fo knows, bring about...
Kangaroo, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in June, is a masterly example of the Russian mode of skaz, or first-person narrative in the vernacular rather than in literary language. Aleshkovsky, who tells his manic tale in the voice of the crook, displays a phenomenal command of police, prison and underworld slang, as well as Russian obscenity. The writer is currently at work on a novel about a Soviet exile in the U.S. Its hero is a small-time Soviet Casanova who ceaselessly roams the country in a rented car in search of love and lust. He finds both...
...shock and rage. He then proceeds to kick out his offspring in the hope that "...he'll see the light when he feels the heat." The expectation seems futile, for the son's grief at the end appears just as self-indulgent and uncomprehending as does his affection and manic cheer throughout the rest of the film...
...glassy-eyed millions of the TV generation: Saturday Night Live. In each installment, a guest host and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players (Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray et al.) teetered on the cutting edge of comedy chaos. The humor was topical, hip, manic, risky, urban and wildly uneven. It was guerrilla television and it radicalized American comedy...