Word: youngmans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cutting edge, no point of view to make it satire instead of a collection of better-and-worse gags. There is nothing in it that could possibly offend the comfortable businessman in from Brookline for a wild evening in the Square. Perhaps the funniest bit is about a youngman who takes his incredibly uncouth date to a fancy French restaurant. Even honest gross-out humor like this (it ends with her throwing up) seems funnier than "mild" political satire. During the Ford routines, for example, we're laughing at a stupid man, any stupid man, and the fact that...
...accept Adams' conceit that rabbits "are like human beings in many ways." Adams' rabbits, like people, are divided into leaders, prophets, poets and even comedians. ("Do you know what the first blade of grass said to the second blade of grass?" asks the hlessil Henny Youngman. "He said 'Look, there's a rabbit! We're in danger!' ") The most favored Adams rabbits seem to speak in U accents ("I say, what's happened?") and express a no-nonsense appetite for duty. The least favored Adams rabbits seem to incarnate the attitudes...
...partner, while running around four chairs obstructing his side of the court, while wearing an overcoat, while carrying a pail of water. In a sunburst of understatement, he says: "I'm a fun guy, I'll do anything for excitement, I'm a ham." Ham? Henny Youngman is merely a ham. Bobby is an extraterrestrial peculiarity. At the antic rate he is going, yaks and Bulgarian bears may be only a step or two away...
Then came Portnoy's Complaint, the public flowering of the Henny Youngman Roth, the brilliant cocktail-party mimic, hilarious storyteller and improviser of ingenious bits. His university degrees were set aside for the lessons learned on Newark's front stoops, where wisecracks and putdowns were the comic antitoxins against WASP sting and the guilt that could result from calling chicken soup consomm...
Like Henny Youngman, Roth keeps batting out giggles, averaging about .265. Like Richard Nixon, he must make everything perfectly clear. Roth distends everything beyond the operating limits of farce. He seems out to do nothing less than debunk every myth of American life. Top on his list is the notion of winning by fair play and sportsmanship. In a total inversion of those Boys Life inspirational stories, Roth tells of Gil Gamesh, a pitcher so great that he refuses to obey the rules...