Word: sketches
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...Peoples Against Hootie & the Blowfish. This week the New York Times dismissed Rucker as rock's "reigning crybaby," a reference to his emotive lyrics. Some of the criticism cuts deeper. A writer for the Village Voice compared the band to a minstrel show, and Saturday Night Live did a sketch where Rucker leads beer-swilling white frat boys in a countermarch to Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March (apparently, to the mostly white staff at SNL, successful blacks must be sellouts...
...guess about what that part of the puzzle might be about and then modestly decline overspeculation about the pieces that don't fit." Instead, "these solvers ... throw away the central piece ... and then bring in pieces from other puzzles [i.e., apocryphal manuscripts]. Finally, they take this jumble of pieces, sketch an outline of what the [whole thing] ought to look like on the basis of some universal puzzle pattern, and proceed to reshape the pieces until they fit the pattern." Inevitably, he writes, that pre-determined pattern is dictated by the puzzlers' sociological or political prejudices...
...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...
...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...