Word: tummler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...