Word: mort
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...Public Enemy Number One, Part 1 Directed by Jean-Francois Richet. Screenplay by Abdel Raouf Dafri, from the book L'Instinct de mort by Jacques Mesrine. With Vincent Cassel, Cécile de France, Gérard Depardieu, Roy Dupuis. From France...
This is a relatively new phenomenon. The best political satirists of the 1950s and '60s were prickly outsiders, scornful of the high and mighty. When Mort Sahl sat on a nightclub stool and took out his newspaper to deconstruct the day's headlines, or Lenny Bruce lashed out, in X-rated language, at the political and moral hypocrisy he saw around him, they hardly expected, or wanted, the targets of their satire to show up onstage at the hungry i and join in the laughs...
Laugh, that is, with an uneasy edge. Comedy was about to break off from its '60s emphasis on topical humor (exemplified, in varying levels of toxicity, by Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Johnny Carson). Young comics of the '70s were as suspicious of Vietnam humor as they were of mother-in-law jokes. Their stuff was apolitical--but radical. It challenged the very notion of making people laugh. When Albert Brooks impersonated a mime so inept he must describe his movements, or Andy Kaufman turned on a plastic record player and lip-synched to the Mighty Mouse theme song...
...Comedian Mort Sahl spoke for many now famous performers when he said he was "set free" by Enrico Banducci, the influential impresario of the seminal San Francisco nightclub the hungry i. After buying the cabaret in the early 1950s for $800, Banducci installed a brick-wall backdrop, now standard in comedy clubs, and urged artists to be themselves. In addition to nurturing Sahl, known for his edgy political satire, the flamboyant, beret-clad enthusiast helped launch such performers as Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby and the Kingston Trio. Banducci...
...stuff by jumping on Ahmadinejad and Columbia University and liberals in general. Mitt Romney runs an ad in which he brags that he denied the milquetoast reformer Khatami a police escort to Harvard University in 2006. Now there's a man! The New York Daily News, owned by neoconservative Mort Zuckerman, runs the headline the evil has landed. The cable news networks hyperventilate. Even the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, feels the need to demolish Ahmadinejad - elegantly, I must say - before the speech. A giant toxic bubble overwhelms the public square...