Word: shtick
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...frivolous can be called an issue -- was whether a performer can use material created for a program owned by another network. "There are certain intellectual-property issues that do not travel with Dave," warned peacock president Robert C. Wright on NBC's summer press tour, referring to such Letterman shtick as Stupid Pet Tricks, Larry "Bud" and the Top 10 List. "If CBS thought they were buying that, they didn't . . . They can certainly do things like that. But they can't do those things...
...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...