Word: shtick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...characters on Seinfeld are more rounded and less stereotyped than practically any on TV. Kramer, for example, the next-door neighbor with the electric hair and thrift-shop wardrobe, could have been a typical sitcom shtick figure. Instead he's an impassioned eccentric with endless reserves of nuttiness. (After the group orders Chinese food, he shouts a final request into the phone: "And extra...
These days, you don't get 15 minutes of fame, you get maybe 15 seconds. Thirty if you're good. And then -- bang! We're tired of your sorry shtick already. Bring us a younger Debbie Gibson. Fetch us a prettier Julia Roberts. Get us a funnier Denis Leary...
...does Crystal constantly want to redeem Buddy in the viewer's eyes? Why does the film go so moist just before the final punch line? Any Buddy could tell you: because kitsch is not just an anagram for shtick. In comedy the two are soul brothers -- the entertainer's way of saying "Love me, laugh with me, laugh at me, hate me, then forgive me and love me all over again...
Seinfeld seems totally at ease as a sitcom leading man, all gawky insouciance and whiny sarcasm. When he visits his parents in Florida, the family conversation has the ring of truth, not shtick. Mom, commenting on Jerry's scuba diving: "What do you have to go underwater for? What's down there that's so special?" Jerry, unfazed: "What's so special up here?" Traveling to Los Angeles to appear on the Tonight show, he spends his time fretting because the hotel maid threw out his notes for a new joke. Seinfeld isn't the first TV show...
...they are doing laundry. They understand that washing machines eat socks." In the '90s these changes are amplified on the nightclub circuit, where 20% of the comics are female, up from perhaps 2% a decade ago. Even that minuscule group used to give itself the short end of the shtick: "When I was born I was so ugly, the doctor slapped my mother." In comedy's Paleolithic era, notes Budd Friedman, impresario of Los Angeles' Improv comedy club, "stand-up was traditionally a white male enclave. But today there are no restrictions. Women are able to use their intelligence...