Word: payoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cosby developed his style by studying such comics as Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, whose 2,000-Year-Old Man routine "taught me that if the audience knows you can be funny when you want to be, they will be willing to wait for that payoff." Among his early routines was a famous bit in which God tries to convince a skeptical Noah that he should build an ark. But Cosby soon gravitated toward a more fertile subject: his childhood. In vivid, richly textured narratives, he told of cutting up with neighborhood characters like Old Weird Harold and Fat Albert...
...Catch a Rising Star, a Manhattan comedy club. Indeed, many young comics regard stand-up comedy less as a goal than as a stepping stone. "People today are not just shooting to be * headliners," says Dennis Perrin, a New York-based comic and writer. "They want the big payoff -- a movie or TV series...
Last week Interior Secretary Donald Hodel proposed a reversal of that decision. If the reservoir could be drained and the valley restored to its original condition, mused Hodel in a staff memo, "what a tremendous payoff for America...
...final flaw in No Way Out is more easily explained and ignored. Indeed, viewers who arrive at the movie five minutes late and leave five minutes early will avoid the setup and payoff for the preposterous twist that spoils this lively, intelligent remake of 1948's The Big Clock. A naval officer (Kevin Costner) is assigned to investigate a murder committed by his boss, the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman, his honest face at odds with his twisted soul), but for which the officer is the prime suspect. Costner and the victim- to-be (gorgeous Sean Young) play a romping...
...reforms. That is why he has been so determined to engage the most anti-Soviet of American Presidents in personal diplomacy. Gorbachev needs to convince international public opinion that he is one of history's good guys. So far, he has proved himself a master of low-risk, high-payoff gestures, doing things that in other societies would be considered only normal and civilized. He let Andrei Sakharov return to Moscow from exile, for instance, and thus earned the cautious, qualified support of many dissident intellectuals, including Sakharov himself. Gorbachev has been talking about the dangers of the nuclear...