Word: shtick
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Rudd likes the banter. He's quick-witted, knows his Simpsons lines ("I didn't do it") and a scary amount of celebrity trivia. As a control freak, Rudd knows this shtick can backfire in a flash. It's crazy-brave, but the nerdish dad seems to be titillated by these encounters. Crossing over, Rudd last week took his club act to the safer, anesthetized realm of morning television to grab the oldies. On Mornings with Kerri-Anne, Rudd spoke Mandarin, danced the rumba with his co-host, laid bricks, cooked with chocolate, dispensed marriage advice and mixed pap with...
...personality, or at least persona. Compared with Imus, for instance, his rival Howard Stern may be offensive, but he's also self-deprecating, making fun of his own satyrism, looks and even manly endowment. Imus doesn't take it nearly as well as he dishes it out. His shtick is all cowboy-hatted swagger, and his insults set him up as superior to his targets and the alpha dog to his supplicant guests...
...reader with the everyday oddness of Israel. "I would call it subjective realism," he says of his bizarre storylines. "I am trying to show things the way they feel." Overwhelmingly, in Keret's fiction, things feel edgy. Throughout Missing Kissinger, there is the sense of the dark slap-shtick of a country where, through dumb luck, a coffee in the wrong café could spell death by suicide bomber...
...Like so many supreme expressions of showmanship, this shtick of dynamite - which Brown repeated unvaried for a half-century - was both a stunt and a metaphor. No, he wasn?t at death?s door, and yes, the imploring audience was in on the act. But who cared? It had the gaudy theatricality that would become the norm in pop culture: orchestrated hysteria that was either fake-real or real-fake. On this level, Brown was the godfather, not of soul, but of heavy metal and glam rock, of Rocky Horror and Dreamgirls, of the WWF and Jerry Springer...
What this group of filmmakers shared was a desire to take Nativity beyond the Godsploitation genre, the extended Sunday-school lessons into which many independent Christian films devolve and in which the laughable acting and dialogue and the anticipation of a big payoff at the end feel closer to shtick than art. FoxFaith's first theatrical release, Love's Abiding Joy, a western based on a novel by the Christian writer Janette Oke, made only about $250,000 on 200 screens this fall, perhaps because it was a little like a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie--without the edge...