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      In Pee-wee Herman, Joy and Fun Got Flat-Out Weird

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      Paul Reubens committed to profound silliness without ever going mean or dark — though some peers were disappointed that he focused on one character.Of all the great flesh-and-blood cartoons of 1980s popular culture — Hulk Hogan, Madonna, Mr. T — the one easiest for small children to relate to was Pee-wee Herman. He made the same kind of obnoxious jokes we did (“I know you are but what am I?”), in a similar, if more overtly nasal, squeak while capturing an un-self-conscious exuberance that felt deeply familiar.That’s how it felt. In reality, Pee-wee Herman was nothing like us at all, a dreamy man-child in a red bow tie whose sugary smile could curl into a punky scowl. A singular piece of comic performance art for a mass audience, Pee-wee Herman stood out in every form he appeared in, from improv theaters to late-night talk shows to the movies to Saturday morning television.That this character could be so easy to identify with and so singularly, slyly alien at the same time is the stupendous magic trick of his creator, Paul Reubens, a true original who died on Sunday at 70.The first time I saw him do Pee-wee was on “Late Night With David Letterman,” where he was one of the oddballs the show’s executives would spotlight when they couldn’t book real stars. Unlike Brother Theodore, Harvey Pekar or Andy Kaufman, Pee-wee introduced no hostility or even conflict to the show. His appearances on that most ironic of late-night shows were like invasions from Candy Land. He brought toys and disguises, and he would get up and dance even before the music played. There was a joy in his presentation that was bracing. You laughed not because the jokes were funny, but because they were told with such commitment to the fun of it all.Letterman didn’t know what to make of him. You did get the sense that the host enjoyed his guest’s adolescent jerkiness. But there was more there. Even though Pee-wee was a broad character, something about him seemed more real than any conventional comic slinging punchlines or movie star selling a movie. This was a Bugs Bunny level of charisma, built to last.Paul Reubens (born Paul Rubenfeld) started his career doing many characters for the sketch group the Groundlings, and he went on to embody even more extreme characters, including the monocled father of the Penguin in “Batman Returns” and an Austrian prince with an ivory hand in “30 Rock.”But once Pee-wee became a hit with crowds in the 1970s, he mostly abandoned his other roles, to the frustration of Phil Hartman, his improv peer and a future “Saturday Night Live” star, who thought he was wasting his talent focusing on just one part.By the time he was starring in a Pee-wee movie directed by Tim Burton, Reubens was credited only as the writer. Pee-wee Herman played himself. This blurring of character and actor added a sense of mystery, and odd authenticity, to this stylized performance. A natural outsider, Pee-wee excelled at fish-out-of-water comedy. In “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (1985) a classic comedy that is still Burton’s best movie, Pee-wee finds himself winning over unlikely people in a quest narrative about his search for his bike.He accidentally knocks over the motorcycles of a bunch of grizzled Hells Angels types, before charming them by jumping on the bar and dancing to the Champs’ surf tune “Tequila.” In another bit, he is talking in a telephone booth and trying to explain where he is, so he peeks his head out to sing, “The stars at night are big and bright.” A team of cowboys responds in unison: “Deep in the heart of Texas!”The world of Pee-wee is full of this loopy surrealism that could veer into innuendo but never got dark. It was always welcoming, wildly diverse, profoundly silly. The movie, along with his anarchic Saturday morning children’s show, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” melded a child’s energy with a love of show business. Reubens, who grew up in Sarasota, Fla., nearby the winter headquarters of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, managed to imbue such entertainment with the spirit of performance art, while never taking the easy route of going mean or dark. His work just got weirder.Pee-wee’s television stint ended in infamy when Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in a porn theater. Late-night hosts pounced, and so did the news media. CBS took reruns of his show off the air. The controversy now seems preposterously overblown. That happened just one year before Sinead O’Connor’s career suffered a blow from her protest on “Saturday Night Live” against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — an episode that has come under new examination after her death last week. It’s clear that dopey moralizing scandals are far from a hallmark of our age alone.The one time I talked with Reubens, around seven years ago in an interview, he was, not surprisingly, quite different from his character: thoughtful, reserved, sober-voiced. He was modest about Pee-wee, who eventually returned.No character that beloved, that meme-able, would not be pulled back to action in our current nostalgia-driven culture. There was a Pee-wee Herman Netflix movie and a Broadway show, and, while there were small updates here and there, the character remained in essence the same: giddy, exuberant, singularly strange and primally tapped into childhood.Pee-wee got older but he never grew up. His career is an update on the Peter Pan story, except no one in Neverland would say: “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.” More

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      in Theater

      Liz Kingsman’s ‘One Woman Show’ Lands in N.Y.C.

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      The comedian talks about her slightly goofy, slightly surreal style, and why New York has proved to be “the hardest translation” yet.When it came time to create a trailer for her one-woman show — which is titled, of all things, “One Woman Show” and is playing at the Greenwich House Theater — Liz Kingsman researched what other productions had done. One video especially made her laugh.“It was for one of the Shakespeare histories and it was just close-ups of a man fondling his cuffs and touching his tie,” Kingsman said on a recent afternoon. “You’re like, ‘Is that Kit Harington?’ And then a bit of hair. It’s teasing Kit Harington, and in the end it is Kit Harington.”She decided to deploy the same gimmick for her own promotional trailer, complete with none other that Harington himself (though that “Game of Thrones” star, to be clear, is not in Kingsman’s show). “I’m not famous, so a trailer where it teases me…,” Kingsman said. “No one’s ever heard of me, so who cares?”A similar slightly goofy, slightly surreal style is at work in the Olivier Award-nominated “One Woman Show,” in which Kingsman sends up both a specific subgenre and its stars — boldly confessional, sexually frank, endearingly messy young women — for a “sharply observed satire,” as Jason Zinoman put it in his review for The New York Times.“Liz’s comedy has a sense of authorship that not lots of other comedians are lucky enough to have,” the comedian Alex Edelman said on the phone. (His Broadway solo, “Just for Us,” and “One Woman Show” were directed by Adam Brace, who died in May.) “She’s both totally committed to the character and totally committed to the laceration of the character.”And she has found an audience: Since a one-off outing of the concept in 2019, “One Woman Show” has traveled to the West End and at the Sydney Opera House. Now Kingsman is ready to move on, and says the New York run, which ends on Aug. 11, will be the production’s last.Jason Zinoman called Kingsman’s show a “sharp satire” about a messy attention-seeker grasping at relevance.Joan MarcusAfter growing up in Sydney, Australia, she attended Durham University in England. There she formed the sketch-comedy trio Massive Dad with Tessa Coates and Stevie Martin, and they performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014 and 2015. Kingsman went solo, firming up a drolly understated sensibility. Most notably, she has spent three seasons as the eye-rolling, unflappable British assistant-turned-lobbyist Rose Pilkington in the French series “Parlement,” a witty cross between “Veep” and “The Thick of It.” (It’s available on Topic in the United States.) “No one I know has ever seen the show so it feels like I’ve made the job up,” she said, laughing.Kingsman, who declined to give her exact age but said “I remain 12 years old,” arrived for the interview with her cockapoo, Emmett, and marveled at the access he enjoyed in New York. “You can go shopping with your dog here,” she said. “Like, you can take them into clothes shops, and you can’t do that in London. That’s really revolutionizing things.”The pair sat down for some hummus and a doggy biscuit at a West Village restaurant near Kingsman’s rented home away from home. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you move to Britain?My mom is British, one of the “Ten Pound Poms”: They needed an immigration boost in Australia so they handed out 10-pounds tickets to British people. When it came to [university], I just went to England — I wanted to go and live in an old building and read books in a little nook somewhere. I quickly learned that it is cold and damp [laughs]. But there is a brilliant industry in London and once I started working, it was very hard to leave.How does humor travel?I’ve definitely found New York to be the hardest translation of the show because I think an American audience believes things that are meant to be ironic at the top. When my character says “Women’s voices aren’t getting heard in theater,” a U.K. audience knows that’s me doing a joke about a woman who would say that very sincerely onstage. But an American audience has been clapping at that line. I don’t know what to do with that because I can’t be, “No, that’s ironic!” I don’t want to generalize too much, but my experience is that there has been a tendency to sort of buy into it a little bit more here.What makes you laugh?I find very serious theater amusing. I saw “Sweeney Todd.” I really enjoyed it, but there’s a sort of big moment where a character dies and the next line was “Oh, no.” The actor had to deliver it with gravitas and I was like, “How are you going to do that? Somebody’s died: ‘Oh no.’ ” I just started laughing at a very serious-themed play. I can’t help it, I just find it funny.The lady does not prefer dungarees: “It was never a specific reference but people started saying that my costume was a reference to one episode of one TV show. And I was like, ‘ecch.’” OK McCausland for The New York TimesOK, but what kind of comedy do you find funny?Commitment to something incredibly stupid makes me laugh — really stupid stuff taken very seriously. There’s a clip from “Parks and Recreation” when [Leslie Knope] is on her campaign run and she has to give a speech in the middle of an ice rink. I’ve watched the clip so many times. It’s quite physical and I love slapstick. The scene generally is very funny, but I also like the idea of how much fun those actors would have had that day. It makes me want to be in a show like that more than anything.I love that you’re wearing dungarees in “One Woman Show,” although apparently it’s a nod to one Phoebe Waller-Bridge wore in “Fleabag”?It’s not, actually. All the one-woman shows I saw, they wear overalls or dungarees because there’s a little bit of “girl next door” about it. If you ever go to any of those festivals like Edinburgh or Brighton, it’s just a sea of women wearing overalls, dungarees or boiler suits. I couldn’t do the show in a boiler suit so I was like, “It’s got to be dungarees.” It was never a specific reference but people started saying that my costume was a reference to one episode of one TV show. And I was like, “ecch.” Also, if I wanted to parody a costume, I’d do a better parody.American female comedians don’t appear to be into dungarees to the same extent.It’s just an unflattering outfit, basically.I think they’re cool! Like something the tomboy George would wear in an Enid Blyton book.But don’t you think there’s a slight kink about that? It’s very hard to describe. Maybe it’s very specific to the U.K. In the script it’s written that she’s wearing messy braids that have been made to look deliberately a little bit messy. She basically has to look casual, like she’s thrown it on but thought has gone into it. It’s all character: It’s what this woman would wear — I would not wear that outfit. Now I will never wear dungarees ever again. And I’m never doing a French braid ever again after August 11! More

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      in Movies

      Zach Galifianakis Lives in the Cringe

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      The comedian and star of “The Beanie Bubble” feels proud to be an American when he watches “The Simpsons.” These are some of his other favorite things.Zach Galifianakis grew up on Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Redd Foxx and David Letterman, but he never sat in front of the family television thinking he wanted to be them. He was more interested in keeping up with his family.He liked the way his older cousins imitated people. His parents were hilarious. They all performed skits at reunions. He once dressed his sister up as the Ayatollah Khomeini. He got good at doing the robot.“The way we communicate is through humor,” the comedian and actor said in a phone interview in July, before Hollywood actors went on strike, adding: “It’s as basic as: I enjoyed the sound of people laughing.”In his latest film, “The Beanie Bubble,” he portrays the billionaire behind Beanie Babies, the stuffed animals that were a cultural craze in the 1990s. There are moments when viewers might not know whether to laugh or cringe.“You don’t see it much in movies because movies want to sometimes show a different side of humanity,” Galifianakis said. “I live in the awkward and cringe because I find life can be like that.”Galifianakis, a 53-year-old resident of the “Canadian woods,” discussed writing jokes on his tractor, avoiding Twitter, and the radio he listens to on the road. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1NatureI grew up rural, and all I wanted to do was run to the city. Now that I’m older, all I want to do is run back to the woods. I always tell people: Don’t forget about the woods, because as city dwellers, as urbanites, as suburbanites, we forget. There’s a lot of poetry in the woods.2Nature DocumentariesI often go back to “Alone in the Wilderness,” this documentary about Dick Proenneke, a man who lived in a remote cabin in Alaska that he built himself. I’m envious of his skill, of being able to live off the earth. There’s something beautiful about that kind of life. I’m a complete hypocrite. I’ll never get there. But had I reworked a couple things, I would’ve probably aimed a little bit more for that kind of life.3Local RadioI don’t know how to work apps. So, when I’m in the car, I listen to the radio. In Canada, CBC always has something good on. When I’m working in Atlanta, radio there has a lot of good, old hip-hop. And when I’m in California, I listen to KCRW, which still plays new music.4Gardening-Adjacent HobbiesWhen I first moved to Los Angeles, I planted peanuts, and I’ve been gardening ever since. My hobbies are usually garden-related, like making my own fertilizer. My kids will go get deer bones out of the woods, and then I’ll grind them up and make my own bone meal.5Grilling for DummiesI cook pizza on my Big Green Egg, which I bought during the pandemic. I’d always been intimidated by grilling. But any moron can cook on that thing and you’ll think you’re eating at an amazing restaurant.6Thinking While on My TractorI’ve had a tractor for a number of years. It’s where I do most of my thinking about standup — specifically joke-writing. It lets me sit there and numb out and think about jokes I’ve done and try to add to them.7Visiting Greece and Taking It EasyThis is the thing about Greece, where my dad’s family is from, and Europe in general: It’s about walking to go get a coffee. It’s about sitting down and having a conversation. I feel like these older societies have their priorities a little bit more in check sometimes. They’ve been through it. They’ve seen it. So there’s a coolness to me about Greece. And I just agree with the lifestyle. Also, the history there is unbelievable.8‘The Simpsons’ (Made in the U.S.A.)I’m always pleasantly surprised at how much that show can still make me gut laugh. There’s not many shows like that. Shows like “The Simpsons,” and the fact that Prince was from America, that just makes me proud to be an American.9A Book Worth Paying Attention ToWhen I read a book, I want everyone to know I read books, so I talk about it to everyone. “Stolen Focus,” by Johann Hari, is basically a deep, deep dive into the phone and social media. When you finish this book, you’ll go: We’ve all been duped, especially young kids who feel social media and constant contact is a must. I highly, highly recommend it, especially for parents.10IRL ObservationsThe biggest crime of social media is that it’s so boring. I’ll hear people say: You should see what I just tweeted out. As soon as I hear “Twitter,” my face glazes over. For somebody like me, I have to observe. I need to see the small spaces in life as an actor, as someone that tries to make people laugh. I’m not going to get that from Twitter. But, look: I’m 53. I’m old. I’m out of the loop. Nobody should listen to me. More

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      in Theater

      Julian Barry, Who Made Lenny Bruce Into ‘Lenny,’ Dies at 92

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      Mr. Barry’s scripts for a hit Broadway play and later a Hollywood movie about that rule-breaking comic helped give Mr. Bruce a lasting place in pop culture lore.Julian Barry, whose scripts for a Broadway play and a Hollywood movie about Lenny Bruce, both titled “Lenny,” became definitive portraits of the comedian as a truth teller who drove himself mad in a righteous struggle against American hypocrisy, was found dead on Tuesday morning at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 92.His daughter Julia Barry said he had died overnight in his sleep. He had been receiving medical treatment for congestive heart failure and, in recent weeks, for late-stage kidney disease.Like Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon, Mr. Bruce died young (he was 40) and became a figure of continually renewed pop-culture lore. His comedy career and his criminal prosecutions on drug and obscenity charges inspired museum exhibitions, one-man theatrical performances and biographies. From 2017 until this year, a fictionalized version of Mr. Bruce was a recurring character on the Amazon Prime television show “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Mr. Barry’s play, which opened on Broadway in 1971, five years after Mr. Bruce’s death, proved that Mr. Bruce could draw an audience posthumously. The 1974 movie version, which starred Dustin Hoffman in the title role, has endured as a classic of the Lenny Bruce mini-genre. It earned six Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, best actor and best adapted screenplay. (Mr. Barry lost to Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo for “The Godfather Part II.”)Cliff Gorman in the title role and Jane House as his wife in the original Broadway production of “Lenny” in 1971.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsIn both scripts, Mr. Barry paid homage to Mr. Bruce by including lengthy passages of his stand-up comedic material. His Lenny Bruce is crude but winningly so — more forgiving human frailty than mocking it, and skillful in using earthy common sense to attack the prejudices of his day.Clive Barnes of The New York Times called the play a “dynamite shtick” of theater, and reflected on the irony that Mr. Bruce had been arrested after using language in nightclubs that by 1971 seemed unexceptional when declaimed from a Broadway stage. “The last laugh,” he concluded, “is with Mr. Bruce.”The Broadway star of “Lenny,” Cliff Gorman, won the 1972 Tony Award for lead actor in a play. As Mr. Gorman told The Times in an interview after the play opened, his performance roused Mr. Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr, to visit his dressing room and address him as a “genius.”Mr. Barry’s script compared Mr. Bruce to Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift. Some people rolled their eyes.“The story Julian Barry has extracted from Bruce’s life tends to sanctify and, in the end, even to solemnize Bruce rather than to explore his obsessions,” another Times theater critic, Mel Gussow, wrote in a 1972 review, when Sandy Baron replaced Mr. Gorman.But Mr. Barry found a powerful fan in Bob Fosse. After directing the movie version of the Broadway musical “Cabaret” (1972), for which he won the Academy Award for best director, Mr. Fosse decided that he wanted “Lenny” to be his next film project. He hired Mr. Barry to write the script.“In the play, I mythologized Lenny Bruce,” Mr. Barry told Rolling Stone in 1974. In contrast, he said, the movie offered “a cold, objective approach.”Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce and Valerie Perrine as his wife, Honey, in the 1974 film “Lenny,” directed by Bob Fosse and written by Mr. Barry.United ArtistsMr. Barry was perhaps referring to the film’s depiction of Mr. Bruce’s decline — ranting onstage about his arrests, shooting heroin, speechifying pathetically in court and finally dying of a morphine overdose naked on his bathroom floor in Los Angeles.Yet in “Lenny,” filmed in arty black and white, Mr. Bruce’s flaws are redeemed. He cheats on his wife, but he shows himself to be faithful to her when she needs him most. His idealism about racial slurs — that by using them people can sap them of their malign power — goes unquestioned. His enemies in the legal system do not explain their defense of conservative social mores.Mr. Barry saw Mr. Bruce as a tragic hero.“The whole beauty of Lenny,” he told Rolling Stone, “is his message: We’re all the same schmuck.”Julian Barry Mendelsohn Jr. was born on Dec. 24, 1930, in the Bronx and grew up in the Riverdale neighborhood. His father struggled as a salesman during the Depression but eventually rose to become an executive at the Hudson Pulp and Paper Company. His mother, Grace (Fein) Mendelsohn, donated time and money to Jewish causes and the theater.Julian began acting as a teenager while attending Horace Mann, a day school in Riverdale, where, he wrote in his memoir, “My Night With Orson” (2011), he was a “townie” — not as privileged as wealthier fellow students who lived in uptown Manhattan. Believing it would aid a future career in show business — and following the advice of Philip Burton, a British director who taught at a summer acting camp that Julian attended — he modified his name to sound less Jewish while still just a teenager.He was briefly an undergraduate at Syracuse University and Emerson College in Massachusetts. After serving in the Army and fighting in Korea in his early 20s, he established a career as a Broadway stage manager. He then took a risk at the age of 35, turning down steady work to focus on writing.Mr. Barry’s first screenplay to be filmed was “Rhinoceros” (1974), an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s play starring Gene Wilder, left, and Zero Mostel.Kino InternationalMr. Barry found success in television writing scripts in the 1960s for popular shows like “Mission: Impossible.” His first screenplay to be filmed was “Rhinoceros” (1974), an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s play, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder.Mr. Barry’s four marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Julia, from his third marriage, to the film producer Laura Ziskin, he is survived by his longtime partner, Samantha Harper Macy; two daughters, Sally and Jennifer Barry, from his second marriage, to Patricia Foley; a son, Michael, also from that marriage; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson.In his autobiography, Mr. Barry described years of meeting stars and starlets. He and Frank Sinatra spent hours telling old stories and imagining a movie they might make together.Summing up his life in the mid-1980s, he wrote, “I was still bumming a ride on my Academy nomination.”Yet project after project of his did not get made, lost in the Hollywood purgatory known as “development.”To some extent, Mr. Barry wrote, it was his own fault for becoming too hip for his own good. He grew his hair long, and he name-dropped in the offhand style of a “Hollywood Phony,” he wrote. Discussing a script of his with Robert Redford and the director Sydney Pollack in Mr. Redford’s hotel room, he suddenly lit up a joint. He was later told that the two men did not like him.“I had to live up to my reputation,” Mr. Barry recalled, “as the man who wrote about Lenny Bruce.” More

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      in Television

      ‘Creamerie’ Season 2 Review: Where the Boys Aren’t

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      In a raunchy, rollicking post-pandemic (not that one) comedy from New Zealand, the men are gone but the women are as nasty to one another as ever.Contains many spoilers for Season 1 of “Creamerie.”The New Zealand post-viral-apocalypse comedy “Creamerie” likes to begin an episode right where the previous one left off. So the show’s second season, which premiered Saturday on Hulu, begins mid-cliffhanger: Its three heroines cowering and aghast as they watch their mean-girl nemesis French kiss the traitorous man they thought they loved. (One of them is his sister, another his widow. It’s complicated.) Underscoring the action are the moans of the naked men in the background who are attached, like dairy cattle, to stainless steel tubes that are rhythmically collecting their semen.Oh, did I forget to mention that the viral apocalypse in question only killed humans with Y chromosomes? “Creamerie” is in the science fiction subgenre of world-without-men shows; others include the new Netflix anime “Ooku: The Inner Chambers” and FX on Hulu’s “Y: The Last Man” from 2021. These are actually, almost invariably, world-with-a-handful-of-men shows, since much of their pleasure comes from seeing what happens when the power balance is reversed.“Creamerie” was created by the actresses who play the leads — J.J. Fong, Perlina Lau and Ally Xue — along with the writer and director Roseanne Liang. The four have been collaborators for a decade, making Web series about relatably snarky young women in urban New Zealand. What distinguishes “Creamerie” is how seamlessly it incorporates the raunchy, silly, casually comic vibe of those online shorts (along with their female point of view) into a sci-fi-series framework. It’s a clever but unassuming show, which is why its package of laughs, sentiment, consciousness raising and low-budget Saturday-serial action has considerable appeal.Fong, Lau and Xue play Jamie (determined, sorrowful, sexy), Pip (uptight, repressed, resourceful), and Alex (rebellious, profane, loyal), the proprietors of a dairy farm in rural New Zealand. (That they’re in the milk business is a joke that pays off in full with the reveal of the semen farm at the end of Season 1.) Eight years before, a virus was thought to have killed all men and it continues to kill male embryos; the survival of the remaining half of the human race is presumed to depend on the leftover inventory of sperm banks, which is distributed by lottery to prospective mothers.The fundamental question of these shows is how women would act if they were in charge, and the answer “Creamerie” offers is deflating but comically fertile: They would be really, really mean. The area around the farm is governed by Nordic-featured, yoga-toned, ecru-linen-wearing Amazons, led by Lane (the excellent Tandi Wright), an unholy cross of Gwyneth Paltrow and Martha Stewart who wields “wellness” as a tool of oppression. In the new world ruled by women, if you question authority, you are dispatched for a lobotomy — it’s called being permed — and if you don’t fit the right physical and racial mold, your place in society may be tending cows in the countryside.Of course, Lane and her cohorts are keeping secret the existence of a few surviving men, one of whom, Bobby (Jay Ryan), shows up at the farm. His arrival turns Jamie, Pip and Alex into reluctant insurgents, sending them on an antic, highly messy journey of discovery, liberation and violent payback, one that continues through the second season against ever greater odds.Liang, who has directed all 12 episodes of “Creamerie” and written them with several other writers, primarily Dan Musgrove, is best known for the rousing 2020 action-horror feature “Shadow in the Cloud.” Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, a B-17 bomber and a toothy special-effects gremlin, the film played like an extended, well-choreographed “Twilight Zone” episode. Like “Creamerie,” it wasn’t that deep or self-serious, but the confidence and brio with which it was made gave weight to its mix of feminist and maternal motifs and to its emotional payoffs.Something similar happens in the series: the jokes, the shambolic action and the matter-of-fact satire of gender, race and class alchemize into something funnier and more moving than you might expect. Fong, Lau and Xue aren’t, individually, expert comic performers, but together they have a rapport and timing that expertly serve the material.In Season 2 the scope of the story expands, moving into Auckland, where the national government is led by a gently woke prime minister (Isabella Austin) with pink-and-blue hair and a furry green hipster hat. The heroines continue to find improbable escapes from their increasingly perilous situations, falling out and making up with one another in classic buddy-comedy fashion. And they remain gloriously themselves, no matter how dire things get.Waking up after being tranquilized, not knowing where she is or why, Pip frantically checks her hair, in a joke that reaches back to the characters Lau plays in the collective’s online shorts. Against the notion of a female utopia, “Creamerie” stubbornly insists on the primary value of the individual. More

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      in Television

      John Early and His Dizzying New Special, ‘Now More Than Ever’

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      In his new Max special, “Now More Than Ever,” the comedian mixes cringe comedy and cabaret to dizzying effect.John Early’s boundary-blurring new Max special, “Now More Than Ever,” has the perfect title. The hyperbole, salesmanship and euphony of the expression match his literate satirical persona. And it also hints at the main asset and flaw of his hour: the too-muchness of it all.Early is a triple threat in the old-school sense (singing, dancing, acting) as well as in the comedy one (stand-up, sketch, improv). And by improv, I don’t mean the Second City variety so much as the art of vamping, which he jokes is the one thing members of his generation, millennials, were taught to do. Perhaps. But anyone who has seen Early glamorously filibuster (a paradoxical phrase that also suits him) while hosting a live show knows this can be as entertaining as anything.While he might be best known for his scene-stealing flourishes on the series “Search Party” or his long-running double act with Kate Berlant, Early, whose influence can be seen on a whole generation of comedians, shows off a little bit of everything he does here. Using the frame of a behind-the-scenes pop music documentary (Think “Madonna: Truth or Dare”), he mixes goofy comic scenes in which he plays the vain, jerky star with observational stand-up and sultry cover songs.Unlike comics whose music punches up a joke, Early commits to his songs, using a lovely falsetto and pumping bass line in strutting performances of work by everyone from Britney Spears to Neil Young. It’s unusual for a special to toggle between cringe-comedy punchlines and triumphant cabaret exhilaration. And it’s a tricky mix, because the music slows the comedy, and the jokes don’t necessarily complement the music. Early likes being elusive, conflating sincerity and parody, while Ping-Ponging between broad subjects (Donald J. Trump, Silicon Valley) and rarefied references. (He’s the first comic to ever make me cackle at the word “plosive.”)He has more than enough charisma to fit together this jigsaw puzzle of a show. It’s coherent if not easy to access. The key to his persona, I think, can be found in the joke he tells about the always-be-selling vanity of his generation, presenting himself as its avatar. “Here’s what it boils down to,” he says. “I don’t know how to do my taxes, but I do know how to be a badass.” Then he clarifies, “A shell of a badass.”That’s the role Early plays here. In black leather pants, he dances across the stage, flirting with the crowd with as much ingratiation as the camera fawningly displays toward him. This shell is fun to look at, in part because it’s full of cracks. And you don’t just see it when he introduces his parents in the crowd and reverts to a bratty, insecure kid, or when he does a very funny take on the “Access Hollywood” tape that compares Trump to Early as a closeted 12-year-old in the locker room trying to convince his friends he likes a girl. “If we’re honest,” he says, “Donald Trump is not a sensual person.” It’s the way he says “If we’re honest” that cracks me up.One of the many reasons Early is so hard to pin down is that while he leans on swagger and gusto, his most distinguishing moments mix in another register, his bookish alertness to language. My favorite bit is an inspired mountain-out-of-a-molehill joke about how Apple manipulates you into giving up personal data by offering these choices when you try to download an app: “Allow,” a word he describes as “pillowy,” or “Ask App Not to Track,” which he terms “the single most suicidal sequence of monosyllabic sounds.” There’s no way I can do this justice in text, but it’s essentially five minutes of close-read literary criticism that ends in tears and hysteria. If, like me, that’s your kind of thing, you’re in luck.There’s also a strain of comedy here that lampoons the virtue-signaling language of the overly online. Early taps the microphone: “Check, check. You guys can hear me, right?” he asks before adding: “I just want to make sure this is amplifying queer voices.”While Early defines himself as the quintessential millennial, he has the Generation X obsession with a romanticized version of the culture of the 1970s. The grainy film stock and chunky red font of this special remind me of a Tarantino movie. In one revealing nostalgic riff, Early yearns for the days of Bob Fosse, when louche choreographers were on talk shows and dance could be “kinky and mysterious.”Fosse could also be both sexy and ridiculous. While I wish “Now More Than Ever” had a bit more precision and ruthlessness in its direction (by Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey), and there’s a visceral energy lost in the translation from live performance to film, at his best, Early evokes a gyrating, deliriously decadent razzle-dazzle.Toward the end, Early invites his band members to teach him how to play instruments so he can flirt and sexually harass the band, which leads to a visit from the channel’s woman from Human Resources.You get the sense that Early is annoyed by such bureaucratic scolds, but you would never find him responding to it with something as boring as complaining about cancel culture. Instead of defending himself, he flashes a guilty look and rushes into a final song. It’s a hypnotic, joyful performance of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”As the camera swirls and splotches of yellow light flare, Early, sweat glistening under a disco ball, loses himself in reverie. At the start of the special, titles on the screen instruct you to turn the volume up, and it’s good advice. You can’t recreate the feel of a New York dance party by watching a special at home, but why not try? This is comedy that wants you to get up and dance. More

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      Alan Arkin, Comic Actor With a Serious Side, Dies at 89

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      He got laughs and won awards on Broadway in “Enter Laughing” and in movies like “Little Miss Sunshine.” But he also had a flair for drama.Alan Arkin, who won a Tony Award for his first lead role on Broadway, received an Academy Award nomination for his first feature film, and went on to have a long and diverse career as a character actor who specialized in comedy but was equally adept at drama, died on Thursday in San Marcos, Calif. He was 89. His son Matthew Arkin said that Mr. Arkin, who had heart ailments, died at home.Mr. Arkin was not quite a show-business neophyte when he was cast in the 1963 Broadway comedy “Enter Laughing,” Joseph Stein’s adaptation of Carl Reiner’s semi-autobiographical novel about a stage-struck boy from the Bronx. He had toured and recorded with the Tarriers, a folk music group, and he had appeared on Broadway with the Second City, the celebrated improvisational comedy troupe. But he was still a relative unknown.He did not stay unknown for long.In a cast that included established professionals like Sylvia Sidney and Vivian Blaine, Mr. Arkin stole the show and won the hearts of the critics. “‘Enter Laughing’ is marvelously funny, and so is Alan Arkin in the principal role,” Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times.Mr. Arkin won a Tony. The show ran for a year and made him a star.Mr. Arkin, left, with his fellow cast members Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson and the director Mike Nichols, right, preparing for the opening of the play “Luv” on Broadway in 1964.Leo FriedmanReviewers were again enthusiastic, and Mr. Arkin again found himself in a hit show, when he returned to Broadway in 1964 as a woebegone misfit in Murray Schisgal’s absurdist farce “Luv,” staged by Mike Nichols and co-starring Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. With two Broadway triumphs under his belt, it was a confident Mr. Arkin who moved from the stage to the screen in 1966.“I never had any doubts about making it in movies,” he told The Daily News a year later. “I just knew I had to, because there was no alternative.”His confidence proved justified. He was nominated for an Oscar for his first feature film, “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” an offbeat comedy about the hysteria that ensues when a Russian submarine runs aground on an island in Massachusetts. As the frantic leader of a landing party sent ashore to find a way to refloat the vessel, he earned a place in cinema history with a riotous scene in which he teaches his non-English-speaking crew to say “Emergency! Everybody to get from street!”That led to a series of roles that established him as a man of a thousand accents, or close to it. He played a French detective in “Inspector Clouseau” (1968), putting his own spin on a role created (and subsequently reclaimed) by Peter Sellers; a Puerto Rican widower in “Popi” (1969); a Lithuanian sailor in the television movie “The Defection of Simas Kudirka” (1978); and many other nationalities and ethnicities.Mr. Arkin in the 1966 film “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.” His performance as a Russian submarine commander earned him his first of four Academy Award nominations.United Artists, via Photofest“I could play any kind of foreigner,” he told The Times in 1970. “But I can’t play any kind of native of anywhere.”But he soon became even better known for playing likably hapless Everyman characters. The ultimate Arkin Everyman was Captain Yossarian in “Catch-22” (1970), Mike Nichols’s film version of Joseph Heller’s celebrated World War II novel.“Catch-22” received mixed reviews and was a disappointment at the box office, but Mr. Arkin’s performance as Yossarian, a panicky bombardier constantly looking for ways to avoid combat, was widely praised. In his Times review, Vincent Canby said of Mr. Arkin that “because he projects intelligence with such monomaniacal intensity, he is both funny and heroic at the same time.”By that time Mr. Arkin had also successfully ventured outside the realm of comedy, establishing a lifelong pattern. In “Wait Until Dark” (1967), a suspense drama starring Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman who is terrorized by drug dealers looking for a secret stash of heroin, he was convincingly evil as the dealer in chief.In “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (1968), based on the novel by Carson McCullers, he played a deaf man drawn to help the disadvantaged in a racially divided Southern town. That performance earned him his second Oscar nomination.Mr. Arkin with Sondra Locke in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (1968). His performance as a deaf man drawn to help the disadvantaged earned him his second Oscar nomination.Warner Brothers PicturesIt would be almost 40 years before his third nomination, and his only Oscar, for his portrayal of a crusty and heroin-habituated grandfather in the indie comedy “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006). His fourth and final nomination was for his role as a cynical movie producer in “Argo” (2012), Ben Affleck’s based-on-a-true-story account of the made-in-Hollywood rescue of hostages in Iran.The years between nominations were busy ones.Alan Wolf Arkin was born on March 26, 1934, in Brooklyn to David Arkin, a painter and writer, and Beatrice (Wortis) Arkin, a teacher whom he later remembered as “a tough old Depression-style lefty.” The family later moved to Los Angeles, where his father lost his job as a schoolteacher when he refused to answer questions about his political beliefs.Mr. Arkin studied acting at Los Angeles City College and later at Bennington College in Vermont, which was a women’s school at the time but accepted a few male theater students.His first professional experience, however, was not as an actor but as a singer and guitarist with the Tarriers, a folk group that had hits with “The Banana Boat Song” and other records. “I thought it was going to be an entree into an acting career, like the naïve young man that I was,” Mr. Arkin said in 2020 when he and his son Adam were guests on “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast.” “It didn’t, so I quit them after two years.”Mr. Arkin with, from left, the writer Murray Schisgal, the producer Marc Merson and the actor John Gielgud on the set of the 1966 television movie “The Love Song of Barney Kempinski.”Sam Falk/The New York TimesHis first notable work as an actor was with the Second City in Chicago, which he joined in 1960. “I took the Second City job because I was failing in New York,” he told The Times in 1986. “I couldn’t get arrested. When I got there I wasn’t funny at all. But slowly I built one character, then another, and the audience helped teach me what was funny and what didn’t work.”He made his Broadway debut in 1961 in the company’s revue “From the Second City.” From there, it was a short step to “Enter Laughing.”It was also a relatively short step from acting to directing. In 1966 he directed the Off Broadway play “Eh?,” which featured a young Dustin Hoffman. In 1969 he directed a successful Off Broadway revival of Jules Feiffer’s dark comedy “Little Murders.”He also directed the 1971 movie version, which starred Elliott Gould and in which Mr. Arkin played a small role. It was one of only two feature films he directed. Neither “Little Murders” nor “Fire Sale,” released in 1977, was a hit.By far the most successful of his dozen or so stage directing credits was the original Broadway production of the Neil Simon comedy “The Sunshine Boys” (1972), which starred Jack Albertson and Sam Levene as two feuding ex-vaudevillians reunited against their will, and for which he received a Tony nomination.Mr. Arkin played a mild-mannered dentist dragged into an insane adventure by a mysterious character played by Peter Falk in the 1979 comedy “The In-Laws.” Warner Brothers PicturesMr. Arkin told The Times in 1986, when he was staging an Off Broadway revival of the 1937 farce “Room Service,” that he much preferred directing for the stage to acting on it.“I’m always grateful that I don’t have to do it,” he said. “I haven’t been onstage for 20 years, and there have been maybe 15 minutes when I wanted to go back.”But he continued to stay busy in the movies. His memorable roles in the 1970s included a sympathetic Sigmund Freud coping with the drug-addicted Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson) in “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1976), and a mild-mannered dentist — another quintessential Arkin Everyman — dragged into an insane adventure by a mysterious character (Peter Falk) who may or may not be a C.I.A. agent in “The In-Laws” (1979).Among his later film roles were a worn-out real estate salesman in the film version of David Mamet’s play “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992), a psychiatrist treating a professional hit man (John Cusack) in “Grosse Pointe Blank” (1997) and an overprotective father in “Slums of Beverly Hills” (1998). But from the 1980s on, much of his best work was done on television.“There was a period of a year or two when I wasn’t getting many good offers,” he said in 1986. “And a television show came along that I thought was exceptional, and within two weeks there was another one.” He added, “Although I’m more impressed by movies, I find I’m more moved by television.”Mr. Arkin with Abigail Breslin in “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006). His portrayal of a crusty and heroin-habituated grandfather won him his only Oscar.Eric Lee/Fox Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressIn addition to numerous made-for-TV movies, Mr. Arkin’s small-screen roles included the title character, a scheming hospital administrator, on the short-lived sitcom “Harry” (1987); a judge on the cable drama “100 Centre Street” in 2001 and 2002; Grace’s father in a 2005 episode of “Will & Grace”; and, most recently, the cranky agent and best friend of an aging acting coach (Michael Douglas) on the first two seasons of the critically praised Netflix comedy “The Kominsky Method,” for which he received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations in 2019 and 2020.He was nominated for six Emmys in his career, including for his performances in two TV movies based on real events, “Escape From Sobibor” (1987) and “The Pentagon Papers” (2003), although he never won.In 1998 he returned to the stage for the first time in more than 30 years, to good reviews, when he teamed with Elaine May for “Power Plays,” an Off Broadway program of three one-acts. In addition to directing all three and writing one of them (the other two were written by Ms. May), he appeared in two: his own “Virtual Reality,” the surreal story of two men awaiting the delivery of a mysterious shipment, with his son Anthony Arkin; and Ms. May’s “In and Out of the Light,” in which he played a lecherous dentist alongside Anthony, Ms. May and her daughter, Jeannie Berlin.Mr. Arkin in an episode of the Netflix series “The Kominsky Method,” for which he received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.Saeed Adyani/Netflix, via Associated PressMr. Arkin’s first two marriages, to Jeremy Yaffe and the actress Barbara Dana, ended in divorce. In addition to his sons, Matthew, Adam and Anthony, he is survived by his wife, Suzanne Newlander Arkin, and four grandchildren.Mr. Arkin was also an occasional author. He wrote several children’s books, among them “The Lemming Condition” (1976) and “Cassie Loves Beethoven” (2000). In 2011 he published a memoir, “An Improvised Life”; he followed that in 2020 with “Out of My Mind,” a brief history of his search for meaning in the universe and his embrace of Eastern philosophy.Toward the end of “An Improvised Life,” Mr. Arkin reflected on his chosen profession. Noting that a lot of actors “are better at pretending to be other people than they are at being themselves,” he wrote, “When things get tense, when I start taking my work a bit too seriously, I remind myself that I’m only pretending to be a human being.”Robert Berkvist, a former New York Times arts editor, died in January. Shivani Gonzalez contributed reporting. More