Word: tummler
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...Spoke, by Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus, is most interesting in revealing the similarities between standup comedy and campaigning: in both venues, the speaker needs to charm his listeners and stir them to applause (the manual version of voting). Franken is a serious guy with irresistible comic impulses. The tummler in him can?t understand why a top politico would advise him not to tell his favorite joke - one by Buddy Hackett, about a penis growing out of a man?s forehead - on the campaign trail...
...when they hit, you feel them in your gut. And each film has at least one shining moment, whether it be flatulent cowboys or synchronized-swimming nuns. A big disappointment: no Brooks commentaries. The collection is incomplete without a juicy vat of pinwheeling ad libs from the foremost tummler--sorry, raconteur--of our time...
...accounts, Stroman and Brooks were a smooth-running team, the old Catskills tummler deferring to the surehanded Broadway director--though Brooks attended every rehearsal and made constant suggestions. "He's totally attentive, watching like a hawk," says Broderick. "And he picks up even the subtlest things." The cast got used to the occasional Brooksian outburst--"No, no, you're ruining my masterpiece!" he yelled on arriving at one rehearsal--and to his barrage of (sometimes bad) ideas. In one scene Brooks urged Lane and Broderick to try a bit of physical shtick when they exit the door at the same...
...live for herself and hope her happiness will buoy the kids along. Stella's saving gracelessness was lack of awareness; she never realized what a ridiculous figure she cut. Dottie's saving grace is full ironic awareness of the chance she is taking. As she rises from cosmetics-counter tummler to the Carson show to Las Vegas, she works this gag into her act: "If you give kids a choice -- your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in ecstasy in Hawaii -- they'll choose suicide in the next room, believe...
Defending Your Life is better developed as a situation than it is as a comedy (though there are some nice bits, like a hotel lobby sign that reads, WELCOME KIWANIS DEAD). But Brooks has always been more of a muser than a tummler, and perhaps more depressive than he is manic. He asks us to banish the cha-cha-cha beat of conventional comedy from mind and bend to a slower rhythm. His pace is not that of a comic standing up at a microphone barking one-liners, but of an intelligent man sitting down by the fire mulling things...