When we look back on ’60s comedy, we think foremost of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, stand-ups who did yeoman’s work railing against the venality of the establishment (roughly: moneyed white men). More quietly, Bill Cosby actually reached the targets of those comics’ scorn, and made them his audience. Once…
Why is it we keep settling on Romeo and Juliet as Shakespeare’s signature work? Its first critic saw it and sniffed, “It is a play of itself the worst that I ever heard in my life.” Macbeth is swifter, Hamlet more epic. R and J is easy to discover while…
The medical fetish — now there’s one that’ll creep your ass out. Where’s the sex in medicine? Get undressed. Sit on a cold table. Wonder whether it’s malignant. Wonder whether your insurance will cover this visit. Wonder whether it’ll cover this visit and then triple for your entire family for…
Perhaps comedian Patton Oswalt’s says it best when he describes Cirque du Soleil as being “wet and French and gay and on fire.” Well, there’s a different outfit coming to town, but it’ll have similar outfits: It’s called Cirque Dreams, and one of its shows is Cirque Dreams Illumination. The…
What you’ll notice first about listening to a chat with Tenzin Gyatso, known in the hood as the 14th Dalai Lama, is his aura of humble, genial calmness. This is no small feat for a man who has been the spiritual leader of his people for 49 years; he has…
Oliver McCall’s greatest moment as a fighter may have come 16 years ago, but anyone who can beat Lennox Lewis in his prime — send him sprawling onto the floor and into a daze with a hard one-two combo — deserves a look, even at age 44. McCall, who tops…
Welcome to South Florida, you delirious pigskin fans, you! If you’re here to root for the New Orleans Saints, congrats — it sure as hell took you long enough. If you’re an Indianapolis Colts fan, likewise, congrats — you lucked out by dodging the Patriots in the playoffs. Now that…
Through the annals of American football, with the rise and fall of offensive trends, the movement of teams among cities, and the escalation of television’s power, one trend has held fairly steady: Equipment has been improved to protect players’ bodies and brains. The Lingerie Football League has bucked that tradition…
The Heat are in danger of becoming a team one play shy of greatness. At L.A., it was Kobe Bryant banking in a trey at the horn — undoubtedly the shot of the season so far in the NBA — to quash what had been a brilliant final few minutes…
Some time back, a dedicated sports nerd (simultaneously the coolest and least-useful variety of nerd) determined that in a typical Major League Baseball game, the ball is actually in play for only two to three minutes. So even in the best of baseball times — and the past couple of…
The Village People, those campy disco icons, seem today like cartoon characters — decidedly gay ones at that. So it’s worth remembering that when they were founded in 1977, they were conceived as… well, cartoon characters, basically, but not gay, per se. Somehow, at some point (well, instantly, really) this…
One imagines — in those deadline-driven moments when one is paid to imagine — that our American-style New Year’s Eve must seem somewhat staid, even rote, to a gay porn star. This is the date, after all, when civilians pack together in too-warm apartments, messily uncorking champagne bottles, watching a…
People used to say that Ted Williams was that rare person who’s best in the world at two things: hitting a baseball and flying a plane. Well, Woody Allen is that rare person who, if not the best in the world at all, is a damn fine specimen as a…
As with so many social injustices, South Park brought the plight of Jews on Christmas to the world’s attention when Kyle sang, “It’s hard to be a Jew on Christmas/My friends won’t let me join in any games.” Granted, it’s unclear what constitutes Christmas games these days, other than trampling…
When did the moustache, that prideful patch, become an object of derision? It’s not simply the T-shirts that read “Guns Don’t Kill People: Men with Moustaches Do,” which, true though that may be, still derides our most masculine strip of fur, just like “moustache-ride” wisecracks. At some point, men retreated…
In what other country, but this, the U. S. of effing A., can you stroll into a cavernous public building (named War Memorial, no less, for the men who fought for this freedom) and under supervision of law enforcement officers and the Brady Bill view, handle, stroke, make gangster poses…
If you don’t know what beer pong is by now, you’re probably not going to want to enter this, a satellite tournament with a berth in the fifth annual World Series of Beer Pong in Las Vegas at stake. If you didn’t realize that beer pong, historically a method by…
Who’da thunk in 1983 that Michael Jackson’s actual corpse would look nothing like the swarthy, raccoon-eyed zombie he plays at the end of the “Thriller” video? Most MJ fans, you gotta figure, will always remember him as that curly-headed kid in the red jacket leading a small platoon in some…
The irony of having to interrupt a comedy tour called “Weapons of Self Destruction” for open heart surgery can’t be lost on an omnidirectional brain such as Robin Williams’. He ought to have been in SoFla seven months ago, but instead took time to get one valve repaired and another…
When did vampires become undisputedly the most screwable monster? Granted, the alternatives are paltry: Zombie sex is probably a feisty affair but untenable without copious restraints; werewolf sex is only once a month (or twice, in a blue moon); boogeymen would rather be coming to get you than getting you…
Monster Jam returns! Big trucks race! Kids all squeal. Smells and noises! Trucks weigh five tons! Engines with 1,500 horses! From rafters look like toys. Drivers do donuts. Is that rubber burning? No, that’s big fun! Fun smells dangerous! Pick your favorite! Instigator races Pure Adrenaline! El Toro faces Grave…
You could always tell, if you looked closely, that Bob Saget really was dying inside with every cheesy joke ABC shoved in his mouth before tapings of America’s Funniest Home Videos. He’d parrot some lame line, then arch his eyebrows and sigh. We both know I’m full of shit, it…
