Word: shtick
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...those who haven't yet caught his hilarious shtick, Connerly is the Sacramento businessman and University of California regent who last year spearheaded the campaign for Proposition 209. Maybe it's just my twisted sense of humor, but Connerly has been cracking me up ever since he agreed to chair that anti-affirmative-action crusade. I laughed out loud when I heard that in 1991 this man who says that his hatred for racial preferences is so intense it "seeps out of every pore" had registered his consulting firm as a black-owned business in order to keep state contracts...
...always a faintly combative edge. The era of Saturday Night Live that dished out Dennis Miller's "I'm outta here" and Dana Carvey's "Isn't that special?" fed a hunger for a renewable supply of ironic put-downs. But what may have started as a boomer/Xer shtick has now become a reflex common to all ages, from Bob Dole to Macaulay Culkin (who gave I don't think so its big push by uttering it twice in the top box-office hit of 1990, Home Alone). The militia code name for a possible counterattack on the feds? "Project...
...soul, destined to get that kiss from Liv Tyler. But we don't learn what inspired the Wonders' leader (Johnathon Schaech) to compose the title song--kind of crucial to know, since it's played 11 times in the film. Other band members are mere ciphers (Ethan Embry) or shtick (Steve Zahn). As their manager, Hanks is villainous or fatherly, depending on the script's errant needs. Why he would create this franchise, then collude in its ruin, is a perplexing caprice...
...directs and stars in Hamlet--every word of Shakespeare's longest play--and has cast it with nearly every tony Brit actor (Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud, Kate Winslet, Rosemary Harris) but Emma Thompson. There are also some ringers: Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon and Billy Crystal. How do you say shtick in Elizabethan English...
...made it funny. A fancier of the music hall and silent-film comedians, Beckett turned his stranded souls into entertainers. They dance, do calisthenics, trade philosophies and insults, do a giddy hat-switching routine. They could be Neil Simon's Sunshine Boys: wizened vaudevillians replaying the same old effective shtick for 50 years. They know the absurdity of their plight, yet like every Beckett character, they persevere. They have to, or else there wouldn't be a play...