Word: shtick
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...play relies more heavily on the shtick of Marr's actual routines than on the substance of her life and, like Tears and Laughter, may be dismissed merely as Joan Rivers in overdrive. But Rivers, who has endured more than her allotment of show-business rejection, likes to quote a line from Sally Marr: "I ain't afraid of death," she says. "I'm in show business. I died a million times...
...Talk Soup, has done exactly what might have been expected with Costas' low-key, single-guest interview show: turned it into another Letterman knockoff. He has added a studio audience, an opening monologue (video clips of the day's news followed by Kinnear wisecracks) and lots of prepared shtick to keep the interviews from bogging down in, say, real conversation. For Julia Louis-Dreyfus, he introduced a taped bit purporting to reveal that she is actually bald. For Martin Short, he took out a script of ! The Bodyguard and asked Short to read for the Kevin Costner part. The program...
...know how to bring out the comic best in each other -- Matthau's bullying misanthropy, Lemmon's melancholic good cheer. It follows that they invest Grumpy Old Men, in which they play querulous neighbors, with an appeal that is nostalgic and, if you are a devotee of well- practiced shtick, technically seamless...
...decamping this year to Las Vegas, and neither venue seemed unnatural. Big rock-'n'-roll concerts nowadays are often as much about wowie-kazowie production values -- giant video walls, neon, fireworks, suggestively costumed young men and women, clouds of pastel-colored smoke -- as music. Michael Jackson's highly stylized shtick -- the cosmetics, the wardrobe, the not-quite-dirty bumps and grinds, the Liberace-like gender-preference coyness -- is so Vegas that the city embraced him at every turn: a Jackson impersonator is a star of the Riviera's long-running show Splash; Jackson plays a spaceship commander...
...fact, of course, all those were Limbaugh. Such antics constitute a rather small part of his shtick (rather than a majority, as with Stern, who goes much further than Limbaugh would ever dream of, playing "Butt Bongo" and regularly sending out a stuttering hanger-on to ask celebrities rude questions). But it is a good part of what makes Limbaugh so much more successful than more ordinary conservative radio personalities -- indeed, what makes him the most popular broadcast commentator of the age, maybe ever. "I look at this," Limbaugh has said repeatedly, "as entertainment...