Word: sketches
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...just about finished reading last month's "women's issue" of the New Yorker. Instead of the signature snub-nosed man adorning its cover, it features a woman in pink peering through a lorgnette. The articles inside range from a scrutiny of Las Vegas hotel workers to a sketch by playwright Wendy Wasserstein about her over-achieving older sister...
...NIGHT A FEW MONTHS AGO, Carl Alfarano returned to his Westchester, New York, home after work to discover that he had just missed a visit from two private detectives. They told his wife they wanted his help with a "personality sketch" of Alfarano's old friend Jeffrey Wigand. The pair claimed they had come in person only because they did not have Alfarano's telephone number--something Alfarano insists is not true. "I found it rather unnerving," says Alfarano, who worked with Wigand at two medical-device companies in the 1980s and who gave the men no information. But when...
Part of the problem is that SNL now has to contend with serious network competition each week in the form of Mad TV, Fox's one-hour sketch comedy show based on the hit-or-miss satire of Mad magazine. Though there has rarely been a show that sounded less auspicious on paper, Mad TV has turned out to be a formidable opponent. It has yet to beat SNL in ratings, but it is gaining an edge among twenty-and thirtysomething males, a group perennially coveted by advertisers. It has also developed a following among teenagers who can be readily...
...main creative forces behind Mad TV, Fax Bahr and Adam Small, were writers on the sketch show In Living Color. Perhaps because Mad is free of the white Ivy League frat-boy image that has burdened the world of late-night network comedy--just last week John Pike, a late-night programming executive at cbs resigned over accusations that he had made racial slurs in a meeting with members of the comedy group the State--Mad TV has taken bigger risks tackling controversial racial issues. In a sketch that took a sharp knife to the culture of victimhood, Bryan Callen...
...genuinely unbearable past seasons have worked to SNL's advantage--as well as Mad TV's--in the sense that our expectations for sketch comedy have diminished. "People are happy if they get one or two funny skits in a whole show," notes Fox's Corrao. Disconcerting words from a TV executive. But at the same time, it should be understood that sketch comedy has become increasingly difficult to produce. What does it mean to produce alternative comedy when mainstream pop culture has become so self-mocking? When Miller Lite commercials do smart send-ups of kung fu movies, when...