Word: shtick
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Friends say the deal is "vintage Haim"--referring to the man's renowned eye for value, negotiating skills and colorful Yiddish shtick. "Bubeleh, let's make a deal; I feel it in my kishke," he'll say, referring to his gut. The assets were being auctioned off by the bankrupt German firm KirchMedia, which failed after owner Leo Kirch overexpanded into pay TV and sports programming. Saban was a dark horse, competing against global media giants like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But by early this year, Saban had talked his way into Germany's insular media community and, with...
Before him, TV sets were owned only by the few, the rich. Then, in 1948, the Tuesday-night Texaco Star Theater exploded like a shtick of nitro, with an assault of vaudeville skits, ancient gags and a man who often dressed as a woman. Suddenly everybody had to have a television--all because a middle-aged comic with manic energy and a desperate need to please was making a fool of himself, live, in America's living rooms. Subtle as a spray of seltzer, Berle dominated the young medium's ratings for years, at his peak winning...
...scene with 1993's Loser, a lo-fi novelty hit from which most critics thought he would never recover, Beck was inundated with record offers trying to capitalize on his status as the Slacker Guy. "I could have gone with it," he says. "That could have been my shtick. But I wanted to be something a little more...
...offer from DGC (now Interscope), because it allowed him to record on the side with independent labels and gave him complete artistic freedom. As his subsequent albums bounded between the accessible (Odelay, Mellow Gold) and the avant-garde (Stereopathetic Soulmanure, Mutations), artistic freedom and experimentation became his shtick. It's an inherited trait. His grandfather Al Hansen was a member of the European artists' collective Fluxus, which specialized in Dadaist performance pieces. But Beck draws inspiration from contemporary sources too. "Brando was in some movie"--1996's The Island of Dr. Moreau--"where he's in a white gown, white...
Eminem's great shtick is to be simultaneously inside and outside himself. Several tracks re-enact his 2000 arrest for assaulting a man he saw kissing his now ex-wife. He describes his uncontrollable feelings on Say Goodbye Hollywood while bringing in expert witnesses to comment on his stupidity. A voice-mail message from his manager becomes a spoken interlude in which Eminem is scolded like an impulsive child: "I told you not to f_____ bring your gun around like an idiot outside of your home...