Word: riffs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cohen's form of ambush comedy involves donning an assured and preposterously unknowing persona - the hip-hopeless Ali G., for example - then embarrassing real people by asking inane questions and making rude observations. A riff on the Michael Moore style of confrontation, it's a tactic I'm usually not crazy about, since anyone can seem a fool when he's not allowed in on the joke. As Moore once made me uneasily sympathetic to (or feel pity for) General Motors chairman Roger Smith, so Ali G. nudged me to the side of the politicians and aged authors who were...
...lifting the best line of her husband's 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. She memorialized Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow as having risen from her grief after his assassination to tell the civil rights movement, "Send me." It was a leaden version of the "send me" riff with which Bill had electrified the crowd in Boston two years ago, describing John Kerry's Vietnam service. "She doesn't have his touch," says one of their oldest friends. "My recommendation would be that they not campaign together...
...little humor. "I've lived long enough to know that things happen, and things you?d never expect," she said and then paused, as the members of audience began to laugh nervously. "But we ought to reverse the mean-spirited bankruptcy bill." She got loud applause during a riff on fiscal responsibility, one of her husband?s favorite issues but not one many in her party found very exciting. "People say, well, is fiscal responsibility a progressive issue?" Clinton said. "Well, if the strategy on the other side is to bankrupt the government so that it can't do anything...
...around person,” she says.And during his college days, she adds, Cuse already liked to write. Johnson recalled that the two of them, along with a third friend, submitted a show to the Hasty Pudding at one point.“It was a Pudding riff on Romeo and Juliet,” he says. But what about Cuse’s wish to be as cool as his character Sawyer?“Sawyer is very cool,” Christiane admits. “Is he cooler than Carlton?” She pauses, and says...
...while the style of campus comedy may be similar to those role models (and yes, that means a lavish use of profanity), its subject matter tends to be considerably less angry and less political than, say, Rock's or South Park's. Instead, student stand-ups prefer to riff on more personal themes like their obsession with pop culture (from Brown's Dustin Foley: "You know who I think is having an affair? Waldo and Carmen San Diego. Has anyone seen either of them lately?") or their dating habits (from Kenyon College's Rubin Miller: "Girls always say they want...