Word: sketch
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This unsettling premise is set up in the opening minutes of, oddly enough, a comedy, the first noteworthy new play of the Broadway season, which officially began in May. Burn This starts out as a sly sketch of the way we live now, making fun equally of hip characters onstage and of the dead roommate's unseen blue-collar family. Then the show metamorphoses into a scary collision between those two cultures. Finally it becomes a romance between the elegant choreographer and the dead man's explosive, disturbing older brother -- a sexually charged clash of classes reminiscent of It Happened...
...FUNNIEST cartoon performance, though, is Jy Murphy's, as the insane pool cleaner. He says nothing, but walks up and down the edge of the pool, like a refugee from Monty Python's "Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch. For some reason, this is screamingly funny. But is it funny because Prascak meant for his actors to be so one-dimensional, or because the actors are simply inept? I don't know; it's hard to tell...
...remote control is the unifying image in Amazon Women, an anthology of satirical sketches about our age of Television and the Short Attention Span. In an early sketch, Lou Jacobi plays a man who accidentally aims his remote control at himself and winds up on whatever program happens to be on his set. For the rest of the movie, an instant of television static, as if someone were changing channels, appears between each sketch...
Amazon Women has five directors, including Joe (Gremlins) Dante and John (Blues Brothers) Landis, but Landis' hand is evident in the "Saturday Night Live"-style satire that pervades the movie. That is, each sketch takes one joke and runs with it until it meets an obstacle, like a football player who catches an interception. Most of the time, the sketches "change channels" before they get stale, but some of them don't know when to quit...
...sets him up as a real satirist. With a "keen political sense," she claims in her catalog introduction, "Grooms follows in the tradition of William Hogarth and Honore Daumier, who were canny commentators on the human condition." Alas, the history of American art criticism suggests that you need only sketch a bum to get popped into the pot with Daumier, or a street crowd to be compared with Hogarth. The truth in this case is the reverse: as a satirist, as distinct from a funnyman, Grooms hardly exists. His hearty sweetness drives out saeva indignatio...