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      Larry Storch, Comic Actor Best Known for ‘F Troop,’ Dies at 99

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      His well-honed comic timing, and the mimicry skills he had developed in nightclubs, served him well on one of the sillier sitcoms of the 1960s.Larry Storch, who played a memorable television oddball on the 1960s sitcom “F Troop” and for years carried a secret in his personal life that was odd in an entirely different way, died on Friday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 99.His stepdaughter, June Cross, confirmed the death.Mr. Storch had a long career as a nightclub comic and as a character actor on the stage and the big and small screens. But his other work was dwarfed by the impression he made during the two-season run of “F Troop” on ABC, from 1965 to 1967.The show was a slapstick comedy about an outpost called Fort Courage in Indian country just after the Civil War, and Mr. Storch played Cpl. Randolph Agarn, one of the bigger misfits in a unit full of them. Agarn and his business partner, Sgt. Morgan O’Rourke, played by Forrest Tucker, were constantly hatching moneymaking schemes, most of them involving the local Indian tribe, the Hekawis.O’Rourke was the brains of the partnership; Agarn provided the idiocy, and Mr. Storch’s well-honed comic timing served him deliciously in the role. So did the mimicry skills he had honed in nightclubs, where his act included all sorts of impersonations: In various “F Troop” episodes he played not only Agarn but also assorted Agarn relatives, who somehow found their way to the fort from far-off locales. “I had cousins who came from Moscow, Mexico, Montreal,” Mr. Storch recalled in a 2009 interview. “F Troop” wasn’t on long. But, like many sitcoms in that era of limited television choices, it burned itself into the minds of those who watched it, perhaps in part because it trafficked in the kinds of stereotypes — especially those hard-drinking, firewater-brewing Indians — that would soon disappear from television.Mr. Storch, in a 2007 interview with The Asbury Park Press, credited Mr. Tucker with securing him the role of Agarn.“I was supposed to be the sergeant,” Mr. Storch said, “but when they saw Forrest Tucker dressed in a cavalry suit — he looked like a polar bear — they said, ‘That’s going to be it.’ And Forrest Tucker said: ‘Wait a minute. I’m going to need a corporal around here, and I think he and I would have good chemistry.’” The “he” was Mr. Storch.When not clowning around on the stage or screen, Mr. Storch was party to an unusual secret at home. Before he and his wife, Norma Greve, were married in 1961, she had had a biracial daughter, Ms. Cross, with a Black performer named Jimmy Cross. Mother and child left Mr. Cross soon after June’s birth in 1954, but since the girl was dark-complexioned enough that she could not pass as white, she and her mother began encountering racism. When June was 4, Norma asked friends, a middle-class Black couple in Atlantic City, N.J., to raise her.Later, when the Storches were married and living in Hollywood, June would come to visit, and they would explain to friends that she was an abused child of former neighbors and that they had adopted her, but that she lived most of the year with Black friends.“In those days, people were encrusted in prejudice,” Mr. Storch explained to People magazine in a 1996 interview. “We saw no reason to rock the boat.”June Cross later became a television producer and then a professor at Columbia University. In 1996 she told her story in “Secret Daughter,” a documentary broadcast on PBS, which won an Emmy Award. The personal story of Mr. Storch and his wife has another wrinkle as well. In 1948, years before they were married, they had a daughter, whom they put up for adoption. After Ms. Cross’s documentary came out, the Storches and that daughter, Candace Herman, were reunited.After “F Troop,” Mr. Storch found steady work on other TV shows. He played a reporter who impersonates a priest in a 1969 episode of “The Flying Nun,” with Sally Field.ABC Photo Archives/Disney via Getty ImagesLawrence Samuel Storch was born on Jan. 8, 1923, in Manhattan. His father, Alfred, is described in several biographical listings as a real estate agent, though in a 1983 interview with The Washington Post Mr. Storch said he was a cabdriver. His mother, Sally (Kupperman) Storch, was a telephone operator who later had a jewelry store and ran a rooming house.Ms. Cross, in a telephone interview, said that as a child Mr. Storch would pick up voices and accents from the rooming house guests (Orson Welles, he always said, was one) that served him well later as a comedian.Mr. Storch left high school during the Depression when he found that he could make a few dollars doing impressions in the city’s clubs and acting as M.C. for vaudeville shows. He served in the Navy during World War II. By the time television came along, he was a well-established comic in the city and had used his mimicry skills to gain a foothold in radio.He first came to the attention of television audiences in 1951 as a guest host of “Cavalcade of Stars,” and in 1953 CBS picked him to host the summer replacement show that filled Jackie Gleason’s Saturday night slot. A string of television appearances followed, including a recurring role on “Car 54, Where Are You?” Mr. Storch was also the voice of the TV version of Koko the Clown in scores of cartoon shorts, and teamed with his friend Don Adams as one of the voices in the 1963 cartoon series “Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales.”Then came “F Troop,” which brought Mr. Storch an Emmy nomination in 1967. He worked steadily in television through the 1980s, doing guest spots on “The Flying Nun,” “The Love Boat,” “Love, American Style” and numerous other shows. In 1975 he reunited with Mr. Tucker in a live-action children’s show called “The Ghost Busters,” in which the two men played detectives who searched for spooks. (The show was unrelated to the later “Ghostbusters” movies.)One of Mr. Storch’s Navy friends was a fellow sailor named Bernard Schwartz, who became better known as Tony Curtis and gave Mr. Storch roles in several of his films, including “40 Pounds of Trouble” (1962), “Sex and the Single Girl” (1964) and “The Great Race” (1965).Mr. Curtis and Mr. Storch teamed up again years later, in 2002, in a stage musical version of “Some Like It Hot,” the 1959 Billy Wilder movie that had starred Mr. Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. (The show drew upon the 1972 Broadway musical “Sugar” and added new material.) Mr. Curtis played not his original role, a musician on the run from gangsters who joins a band disguised as a woman, but the millionaire Osgood Fielding; Mr. Storch played the band manager, Bienstock.That show, which toured the country, never made Broadway, but Mr. Storch had a half-dozen Broadway appearances to his credit, beginning with “The Littlest Revue,” a 1956 show that also starred Joel Grey. In 1958 he appeared in the play “Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?,” and he had roles in revivals of “Porgy and Bess” (1983), “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1986), “Annie Get Your Gun” (2000) and “Sly Fox” (2004). His other films included Blake Edwards’s “S.O.B.” and the disaster movie “Airport 1975.” His vocal talents turned up in numerous cartoons as well as in McDonald’s commercials (“the most money I ever made,” he said in 2009).Mr. Storch’s wife died in 2003. His brother, Jay, an actor who used the name Jay Lawrence, died in 1987. In addition to Ms. Cross and Ms. Herman, he is survived by a stepson, Lary May, the author of several books on film and popular culture; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Mr. Storch at a birthday party for Jerry Lee Lewis at B.B. King Blues Club and Gril in Manhattan in 2017. He continued to make public appearances late in life.Derek Storm/Everett CollectionMr. Storch was still making public appearances late in life. In June 2014 he served as mayor for a day of Fort Lee., N.J., a town where he had once performed. That September he appeared at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles and was honored with a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars.In 2016 he was honored by Passaic, N.J., the city the fictitious Corporal Agarn called home. Mayor Alex Blanco said at the ceremony that Passaic had been mentioned all over the world because of “F Troop”; Mr. Storch said that he had never been there before, but that he had chosen Passaic for his character’s hometown because “it sounded tough.”In his later years Mr. Storch maintained an active Facebook page and posted videos on TikTok. He also put in appearances at Wild West City, a western-themed attraction in Stanhope, N.J. In July 2021, at 98, for what was billed as his final public appearance, he toured the site in a sporty red sedan, hamming it up for onlookers.Mr. Storch could sometimes be seen playing the saxophone, a lifelong hobby, in Central Park. Another signature activity, even late in life, was standing on his head. “It helps your breathing,” he explained in 2002 to a reporter for The Detroit News, while standing on his head. “The blood goes to your brain, whatever brain you have.” More

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      ‘Cop Secret’ Review: Bang Bang, Kiss Kiss

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      In this Icelandic spoof of Hollywood action movies, two rival police officers make a love connection.The big reveal in “Cop Secret” is out from the moment the unkempt Bussi (Audunn Blondal), Iceland’s toughest police officer, is forcibly partnered with Hordur (Egill Einarsson), his suave rival from a neighboring precinct. As Hordur strolls toward Bussi in swoony slow-motion, impeccable jacket slung roguishly over one bulging shoulder, Bussi’s stubbled jaw softens. The two may be vying for top dog, but it’s clear that — grooming discrepancies aside — copulation will soon take precedence over competition.Before Bussi’s ultramacho veneer can crack, though, this unruly send-up of Hollywood action movies, gleefully directed by Hannes Thor Halldorsson, hammers every genre cliché into wearying submission. The plot — a silly hodgepodge of explosions, bank heists and sexual repression — charges forward, its dialogue and setups merrily spoofing the buddy-cop canon. Familiarity might be the point, but a screenplay this coarse leaves the actors little wiggle room, reducing them to mouthpieces for recycled jokes.So we have a disfigured villain (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) who shaves with what appears to be a serrated bowie knife; a hard-nosed female police chief (Steinunn Olina Thorsteinsdottir, whom fans of Nordic noir may recognize from the gripping TV series “Trapped”); and an anxious male sidekick, Klemenz (Sverrir Thor Sverrisson), whose chief purpose is to remind us repeatedly of Bussi’s contempt for proper police procedure.“You have no respect for the rules!,” Klemenz moans during the car chase that opens the movie and allows the cinematographer, Elli Cassata, to show off a bit. The sequence is goofy fun; less so is the transformation of a rather sweet gay romance into a cheap comic device.Cop SecretNot rated. In Icelandic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      At Comedy Shows in Lviv, Crowds Look for Humor Amid a Deadly War

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      At the Cultural Defense shows in Lviv, comedians and audiences look for humor amid a deadly conflict. Don’t mind the air raid alarms.LVIV, Ukraine — Some morsels of news are so grim and absurd that they sound like they were conceived in the warped imagination of bored satirists. Like the headline from Belarus a few weeks ago, reporting that 10th graders there were being taught how to aim rifles — using shovels.“What do you think about that?” asks the comedian Vadym Dziunko.Dziunko is onstage with two other comedians and a well-known singer. All are seated and holding microphones, gamely trying to find humor in a place and at a moment when the tragic is trouncing the funny by a spectacular margin.It’s a recent Saturday night at the Cult Comedy Hall, a comedy club in downtown Lviv, near Ukraine’s relatively peaceful western border. Some 100 people have spent about $13 apiece to eat, drink and listen to comics riffing about whatever crosses their minds, which is often the latest news about the war with Russia. Or in the case of this shovel-as-rifle business, the topic is the oddness of life in Belarus, a dictatorship a mere 150 miles to the north.“What do you expect from a country where a potato is a weapon?” says the comedian Oleksandr Dmytrovych. Then he imagines an instructor, giving tips to the kids.“‘We can’t give you rifles yet — —”“‘Because we only have one,’” finishes the third comic, Maksym Kravets.From left, Maksym Kravets, Oleh Luzanov, Bohdan Vakhnich and Oleksandr Dmytrovych riff on whatever crosses their minds.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThis is Cultural Defense, an evening of unscripted and free-flowing humor staged in Lviv every few nights. It began two weeks after the Russian invasion, when Kravets, a Ukrainian intelligence officer by day and a comedian by night, called the co-creator of the show, Bohdan Slepkura, and pointed out that the Cult Comedy Hall was in a basement.“I said, ‘You know, the place is a bomb shelter,’” recalled Kravets, a burly and bearded 42-year-old.Kravets, wearing a T-shirt with “Wildness” on it, and Dmytrovych were sitting in another room in the club after the show recently. Initially, they said, they were not sure anyone in the country was in the mood for chuckles. The shock of the invasion was then fresh and hundreds of thousands of residents from the eastern part of the country were flowing into the city.“Before the first show, we thought, maybe this isn’t the right time for comedy,” said Dmytrovych, who is 30 and bearded, too. (“Without beards we’re ugly,” he explained.)“We were petrified,” he went on. “But after the first show, we came and sat in this room and realized, people want to laugh. They want to hear jokes about our enemy. From that first night, we understood this would be bigger than we had thought.”The shows are held in a basement space that is certified as a bomb shelter.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThere has been exactly one international breakout star in Ukrainian comedy and he happens to be the president of the country, Volodymyr Zelensky. If this puts pressure on others in the business, it wasn’t obvious onstage on this Saturday, when nobody seemed especially pressed to land on a punchline and a singer, Mykhailo Khoma, spent a lot of time ruminating about his childhood.Ukraine has long had a modest live-comedy scene, though anyone accustomed to the standard setup at American clubs will find novelty in the show’s format. There’s no warm-up act, and at no point is anyone standing onstage alone. There are different guests every night. The evening starts with four men leading a raucous call and response in Ukrainian, like the rest of the show.Hosts: “Glory to the Nation!”Audience: “Death to enemies!”Hosts: “Ukraine!”Audience: “Above all else.”Hosts: “Putin!”Audience: Unprintable putdown!After that, the stars take their seats and start to talk.Some of the humor is self-deprecating. In a previous show — they’re all available on YouTube — Dmytrovych riffed about the news that Ukrainian soldiers had mastered a “single use” antitank missile called an NLAW. This was amazing, he said, because by nature and necessity, Ukrainians are accustomed to reusing everything, over and over.“I got slippers in a hotel in Egypt a year and a half ago and I’m still wearing them,” he said. “When they got dirty, I washed them. When they fell apart in the washing machine, I glued them together. Now these are slippers I offer to guests.”Kravets is a Ukrainian intelligence officer by day and a comedian by night.Emile Ducke for The New York Times“For as long as we’re laughing, we’re not giving up,” Dmytrovych said.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesThere are plenty of jokes at the expense of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who is scorned as a blustery idiot who underestimated the spirit and resolve of Ukrainians. The Russian military, on the other hand, is largely spared. The point, explained Dmytrovych, isn’t to belittle the invading forces, which Ukrainians regard as formidable and horrifying. It’s to lift the spirits of people who are not on the front lines, or who might have once lived near the front lines and have since relocated.So during one show, Kravets extolled the surprisingly polished beauty of checkpoints in Lviv (“I would not be surprised if they served lattes”), some of which have exceptionally long lines. (“I thought at the beginning they would take my order and at the end I’d be handed a Big Mac.”)Internal politics are a recurring theme. During a show a few weeks ago, a poll was cited that found 90 percent of Ukrainians want to join the European Union.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Flux Gourmet’ Review: Mastering the Art of Fringe Cooking

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      Peter Strickland’s latest film is a speculative comedy about art, desire and gastrointestinal discomfort.What if the primary sensory goal of cooking were to stimulate the ears? What if you experienced a movie through your nostrils and taste buds, or felt it in your gut? These bizarre, intriguing questions are part of the foundation, the spine — the sofrito — of “Flux Gourmet,” the fifth feature by the British writer-director Peter Strickland.The first, “Katalin Varga” (2009) was a revenge drama set in Transylvania. Since then, Strickland has departed both from genre conventions and from known geography, conjuring parallel realities organized around particular aesthetic and erotic obsessions: Italian horror and sound design in “Berberian Sound Studio” (2013); entomology and B.D.S.M. in “The Duke of Burgundy” (2015); high fashion and Italian horror again in “In Fabric” (2019); and now cuisine.Not the kind you eat — though there are some awkward dinner gatherings and episodes of surreptitious snacking. Food, in the world of this film, is the music of love. Culinary sound collectives are the equivalent of rock bands, building walls of expressive noise from the whine of blenders and the sizzle of vegetables dropped in hot oil.One such group, which can’t agree on a name, has been granted a residence at an “institute devoted to culinary and alimentary performance” in a converted rural manor house. One narrative thread follows the simmering tensions between Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie), who is in charge of the place, and Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed, a Strickland stalwart), the visionary, vegetarian leader of the troupe. Elle adamantly rejects the slightest hint of constructive criticism from Jan, who believes that her largess entitles her to be heard.This tension exacerbates the rivalry within the group. Elle may be the leader, but her bandmates, a floppy-haired emo kid (Asa Butterfield) and an angular avant-gardist (Ariane Labed) have nascent creative agendas of their own. There’s also an element of sexual intrigue, as often happens when aesthetic passions are inflamed. Meanwhile, a rejected band of culinary artists lurks in the shadows, threatening violence.All of this is chronicled — mostly in Greek voice-over with English subtitles — by a saturnine fellow named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou) who works as the institute’s “dossierge.” A writer by trade and a wallflower by temperament, he observes Elle and her colleagues, filming their meetings and performances, interviewing them together and taking notes on their squabbles.The poor man has troubles of his own. Digestive troubles, to be precise, which disrupt his sleep and sour his already gloomy mood. The resident doctor (Richard Bremmer) is a pompous boor, and Stones spends a lot of his time in the lavatory, the rest of it wearing the unmistakable grimace of a man holding back considerable gas.There is obvious comic potential in his predicament, but Strickland doesn’t exploit it in the obvious ways. This isn’t “Blazing Saddles”; audible flatulence is restricted to a single plaintive note, rather than a full symphony. But the unheard music of Stone’s lower intestinal tract is nonetheless a key structural element, organizing “Flux Gourmet” into an elegant fugue of contrapuntal themes: grossness and refinement; pleasure and disgust; appetite and discipline.The film isn’t so much an allegory or fantasy as a witty philosophical speculation on some elemental human issues. We are animals driven by lust, hunger and aggression, but also delicate creatures in love with beauty and abstraction. Those two sides of our nature collide in unexpected, infinitely variable ways.“Flux Gourmet” is Strickland’s funniest film to date, with more outright jokes than its predecessors, and a few sublime visual gags, many of them involving Jan’s outfits (they were designed by Giles Deacon, with hats by Steven Jones). It’s like a Restoration comedy run through a John Waters filter and sprinkled with Luis Buñuel itching powder.Maybe such comparisons are unfair. Certainly Elle insists on the absolute integrity and originality of her work, and even as “Flux Gourmet” mocks her self-seriousness it also defends her dignity. Mohamed, fully committed to the bit, allows you to believe that Elle is both a courageous genius and a complete nut. I’m inclined to think Strickland is more of the former than the latter. I’ve never encountered a flavor palette quite like the one he assembles here, and while this movie isn’t always easy to digest, it’s a taste very much worth acquiring.Flux GourmetNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      in Music

      Judge John Hodgman on Phish Shows

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      A woman’s fiancé wants to drag her along. Must she go?Rachel writes: My fiancé, Steve, wants me to go to a Phish show — he has been to more than 60 — but every time he turns on Phish, it puts me to sleep. I don’t want to pay for an expensive nap. Please order that he stops asking me to go to his hippie festivals.This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this dispute, so before you get married, you should know the law: In heterosexual marriages, every wife owes her husband one Phish show. Now, some husbands may never collect on this deal. But you are — and I’m sorry to write this for many reasons — on the hook. Phish is a whole world to its fans, and Steve deserves the chance to show what makes it special to him. If after this you decide Phish isn’t for you, the matter is closed. (Unless Steve buys an unused Compulsory Phish Show off some other husband. I like Phish fine, but you can have mine, Steve. Find me on Venmo. $5,000.)To submit a query: Send an email to ethicist@nytimes.com; or send mail to The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. (Include a daytime phone number.) More

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      in Theater

      Molière, Turning 400, Can Still Surprise

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      In an anniversary year for the playwright, new productions in the Paris region show why his work still appeals to myriad audiences.PARIS — “I’m in shock,” a teenage boy sitting near me declared when the lights went up on a recent performance of Molière’s “The Forced Marriage” at the Comédie-Française, France’s oldest theater company. “It was really sexual,” one of his schoolmates told her friends on the way out. “It’s not the kind of stuff you should show.”Does Molière, the 17th-century comedy master and doyen of French playwrights, really still have the power to surprise? As France celebrates the 400th anniversary of his birth, a flurry of new productions suggests that he can — and, equally, that his work can easily feel old-fashioned.In both cases, the guilty party isn’t Molière. Wildly different takes on his work have been on show in the Paris region: While the Comédie-Française, whose 2022 program is entirely devoted to Molière, has invested in dark, offbeat productions, “Molière Month,” a yearly theater event run by the city of Versailles, has delivered traditional gowns and breeches, to slightly dull effect.No one could accuse Louis Arene’s version of “The Forced Marriage,” presented on the Comédie-Française’s small Studio stage, of being boring. Sganarelle, the stock central character — a deluded man seeking marriage with a much younger woman — is practically a Beckettian presence early on, looking puzzled on the plain gray stage and muttering lines from other Molière plays. (You could tell the Molière buffs in the audience from the scattered laughs these elicited.)Arene works hard to inject a contemporary sense of absurdity into what is an average play, first presented in 1664 as a three-act comédie-ballet, a hybrid genre combining spoken dialogue with danced and sung scenes, and streamlined into a one-act work four years later. In this production, all the characters are heavily powdered and wear bald caps as well as prosthetics; the size and form of their fake skulls and visible body padding were among the elements drawing cries of disgust from the adolescents in the audience.The five-person cast milks it all, turning standard marriage jokes into ominous physical comedy, verging at times on horror fare. (Vomit and severed body parts are involved.) Gender switches among the main roles, an increasingly frequent device on France’s stages, convincingly heighten the weirdness: In addition to Julie Sicard, who is barely recognizable as Sganarelle, Arene has cast Christian Hecq, a bald, 58-year-old character actor, as Dorimène, the young woman Sganarelle seeks to marry.Hecq doesn’t go for cheap laughs; on the contrary, he is serious and quite sensual as Dorimène. While Molière’s female characters typically resist fiercely when asked to wed suitors they don’t like, Dorimène actually isn’t against the marriage, seeing an opportunity to get rich and reunite with her lover once Sganarelle is dead. (Ultimately, Sganarelle backs out because he fears being a cuckold.)From left, Françoise Gillard, Christian Hecq and Clément Hervieu-Léger in “The Bourgeois Gentleman.”Raphael Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho via Getty ImagesSimultaneously, Hecq has been present on the Comédie-Française’s main stage in a very different capacity, as the co-director of a stunning staging of Molière’s “The Bourgeois Gentleman” with his partner, Valérie Lesort, in which he stars as Monsieur Jourdain, the would-be gentleman. (It means that on some days, Hecq leaves Dorimène behind at 7:30 p.m., slips into Monsieur Jourdain’s costume and steps onto a different stage an hour later.)“The Bourgeois Gentleman” arguably cements Hecq’s place as one of the Comédie-Française’s most category-defying and valuable artists. With his gruff voice, small frame and clownlike gift for physical exaggeration, he could easily have been typecast as a commedia dell’arte servant. Yet his emotional range — willing to be thoroughly ridiculed one second, the picture of relatable heartbreak the next — is evident in his Monsieur Jourdain, the clueless bourgeois who wants nothing more than to be accepted as an aristocrat.And together with Lesort, he has emerged as part of a duo of stage magicians, deploying old-fashioned tricks and visual imagination. In “The Bourgeois Gentleman,” that means flying swords, a life-size embroidered elephant and animated goat heads that sway to one of the songs. Since this play also started life as a comédie-ballet, the original score, by Lully, has been revisited here by Mich Ochowiak and Ivica Bogdanic, in a vigorous style inspired by Balkan music. The costumes, by Vanessa Sannino, are luxuriously eccentric: Françoise Gillard, in the role of a marchioness, looks like a fabulous golden beehive.“The Bourgeois Gentleman” and “The Forced Marriage” each steer Molière toward crepuscular absurdity. Like Ivo van Hove’s “Tartuffe,” which opened the Comédie-Française’s Molière extravaganza in January, both productions are mostly designed in shades of gray or black, a departure from the colorful palette that is customary for the playwright’s comedies.This monochromatic approach helps the Comédie-Française orient itself toward the contemporary even as it celebrates its founding father — something that does not seem to concern Versailles’s “Molière Month,” a likable event founded in 1996. Many of its performances, staged around the town outside Paris where Molière presented a number of his plays to Louis XIV, are free, and feature a mix of professional actors and amateurs.As a result, the quality varies significantly. A staging of “The Impostures of Scapin,” directed by Carlo Boso and starring first-year theater students, drew many families with children to a local park on a sunny Sunday afternoon, though the laughs were few and far between. The fact that a number of roles were played in Italian didn’t help, although the result was easy enough to follow. The audience reacted more readily to anachronistic jokes — like a reference to the film “Titanic” — than to Molière’s lines.Laurent Paolini as Molière in Anthony Magnier’s “The Versailles Impromptu.”Marc-Olivier Carion/City of VersaillesThat wasn’t surprising, since Molière’s gallery of stock characters, heavily influenced by commedia dell’arte, was of its time, despite some innovations and the social commentary he wove into many plays. The opening production of the “Molière Month,” performed outdoors in a courtyard opposite the palace of Versailles, fared better. The director, Anthony Magnier, opted to stage “The Versailles Impromptu,” a rarely seen 1663 play that is cheekily autobiographical.The main character is Molière himself, struggling to put together a show with his reluctant actors. They play was written as a response to his critics, and is difficult to render today, with its parody of a rival company’s actors, which presumably had greater resonance in the 17th century.In a post-show speech, Magnier said the cast had rehearsed the show in just nine days, and it acquitted itself well, with Elisa Benizio a vivid highlight. “The Versailles Impromptu” allowed the text to take center stage, with assorted period costumes and next to no props and sets, yet the play itself didn’t feel especially enlightening or satisfying.On the other hand, when Molière is treated merely as the canvas for a director’s vision, as in some of the Comédie-Française’s productions this year, the inner logic and wit of his dialogue don’t always survive. Does it matter? Perhaps Molière’s true triumph is that four centuries on, his work remains malleable enough to appeal to radically different crowds.Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Directed by Christian Hecq and Valérie Lesort. Comédie-Française, through July 21.Le Mariage Forcé. Directed by Louis Arene. Comédie-Française, through July 3.Mois Molière. Versailles, various venues through June 30. More

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      in Television

      For Norm Macdonald and Bo Burnham, No Audience Is No Problem

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      Filmed during lockdown, a new Netflix special from Norm Macdonald and outtakes from Bo Burnham’s “Inside” suggest that crowd laughter can be limiting.If a comic tells a joke in the forest, did it really kill?There’s a school of thought, one I have long been sympathetic to, that believes that stand-up without a live audience isn’t stand-up at all. Just listen to the debrief among famous comedians that, oddly, follows right after Norm Macdonald’s “Nothing Special,” his posthumous set recorded in his home during lockdown in 2020 and released this week on Netflix.Dave Chappelle compares comedy without an audience to a swim meet without water. David Letterman keeps returning to the point that without an audience, Macdonald didn’t have his “partner,” and something was missing. The closest to a dissent comes from Conan O’Brien, who makes the point that Macdonald always seemed like he could do comedy by himself, saying that when Macdonald appeared on his talk show, the host felt irrelevant.Macdonald is perhaps uniquely positioned to serve as an example of the shortcomings of the audience. His standards could be higher than the crowd’s. There are stories of him deciding to do jokes on “Saturday Night Live” that he knew were funny even if they died in rehearsal.This final special, a raw and moving production, is a gift to fans. It’s a pleasure to hear one last time his faux-folksy locutions (“It doesn’t make no sense”) and the way his jokes could twist (“I have opinions that everyone holds, like, I don’t know, yellow is the best color”) or move full steam ahead. After years of therapy, he says, he discovered why he has a fear of flying. “It’s the crashing and the dying,” he says, his wide eyes twinkling.Judged by aesthetic slickness and tight jokes, this hour isn’t nearly as successful as his last one, from 2017, “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery.” But it’s mesmerizing in different ways. There’s something uncanny about letting the jokes stand on their own, the quiet awkwardness and messy intrusions (a dog barks, a cellphone goes off) offering a reminder that something bigger than showbiz is happening here, a glimpse of a man facing the end, giving his last jokes everything he’s got.Norm Macdonald made Netflix’s “Nothing Special” in his home during lockdown in 2020; he died last year.NetflixMacdonald, who died of cancer last year and is quoted in a scroll at the start of the special saying he filmed it before a medical procedure because he “didn’t want to leave anything on the table in case things went south,” becomes unusually earnest about his mother, expressing what she means to him. In what seems like a tangent, he points out that she didn’t speak with irony and couldn’t tell a good story but she “knew how to love.” As he gazes off, his face inches away from the screen, you might wonder if this is heartfelt or part of a joke (hint: could be both) before the punchline lands. There’s a cleverness as well as a poignancy here that I don’t think could be replicated if an audience were there.Live entertainment is of course singular, and the lockdown only emphasized my appreciation for it. But despite what you might have heard, audiences are often wrong. (Think of the famous comic you hate the most and I promise you they have delighted the crowd.) The audience has an underexamined impact on the aesthetic of specials. Comics spend so much time thanking and praising the people in the seats that it’s worth at least considering an opposing view.Here goes: The audience in specials is fundamentally manipulative, a bullying intrusion on the relationship between artist and observer at home. It can operate like peer pressure. And just as it adds to the excitement of stand-up, the steady, familiar sound of laughter, the most beloved cliché in all of comedy, can also be limiting. When Macdonald talks about his fear of dying and finding a different God than he expected, no sound distracts from the poignancy, and you find yourself looking closer at his face, studying it for clues, hints that may or may not be there.The pandemic forced so many comics to learn about performing to screens. Most didn’t like it, but some had considerable success. And a comic working by himself, Bo Burnham, made “Inside,” the most acclaimed special last year and one of the finest works of art about that period.As it happens, Burnham, who has been relatively quiet for the past year, released over an hour of outtakes from “Inside” the same week that Macdonald’s special premiered.Burnham and Macdonald are from different generations and have clashing styles, one theatrical and flamboyantly satirical, the other deadpan and folksy. But they share a love of language and a bone-deep ironic sensibility. And in these specials, both haunted by death, they show that removing the audience can access emotions a traditional special cannot.Burnham tapped into the pandemic zeitgeist while mounting a musical comedy that portrayed his own unraveling mind. The lockdown became a metaphor for larger trends of the internet age, and “Inside” became a hit not only on Netflix but also on social media, among young audiences who will delight in and study this fertile new release, free on YouTube.Burnham includes many cut songs and satirical sketches as well as alternative versions of familiar bits. It doesn’t play like a director’s cut, but it’s also more than a series of odds and ends not ready for prime time. If anything, it’s instructive to see how some of the bits are funnier than what is in the original special.In one outtake, Burnham performs a parody of a Joe Rogan podcast.YoutubeAmong the darlings that Burnham killed was a scathing, spot on parody of a Joe Rogan podcast, with Burnham on split screen playing two different guys. It captures an essential incoherence of so many thin-skinned comics when they complain about offended audiences: The podcasters insist they are just telling inconsequential jokes a second before describing comics as philosophers.An even more hilarious spoof comes later when multiple versions of Burnham, one representing the writer of “Inside,” the other the director and on and on, appear in a grid onscreen to be interviewed by a glib internet journalist. When they’re asked why there isn’t more diversity, they all freeze and then one Burnham pipes up to flamboyantly offer gratitude for the question. Burnham is gifted at mocking the performative liberal sanctimony of the moment as well as corporate attempts to exploit it, such as his very realistic YouTube ads that pop up below. One reads, “It’s mental health awareness decade at Kohl’s,” followed by the promise: “All laceless shoes 60 percent off.”He has a song at the end of these outtakes that is a clever riff on the chicken crossing the road joke. It could have been a closer to the special, but he cut it. Instead, we see him panicking at the sight of an audience.Performing to no one doesn’t fit most comedy, but it has its advantages. Burnham and Macdonald created a more direct relationship with the viewer, one with more intimacy than can be generated by a close-up.Burnham wanted to capture the uneasy mood of the early pandemic as viscerally as possible. And he clearly succeeded. When my 13-year-old daughter saw “Inside,” her first reaction was: “Is he OK?”It’s not something you would ask about a comedian who just received a round of applause. More

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      What Makes Katt Williams Great? It’s Not the Jokes, It’s the Performance

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      His new special, “World War III” on Netflix, underlines the showmanship and drama that make him the finest arena stand-up of the moment.Katt Williams understands the importance of an entrance.In “World War III,” his new hour of stand-up on Netflix, you first see him racing across the stage like Tom Cruise hustling to save the world. His previous specials have been just as cinematic, with Williams strutting in wearing a massive fur coat and flanked by beautiful women or walking through the crowd in a cape while a voice-over tells you his thoughts.But his most spectacular introduction had to be from “Priceless” in 2014 when the curtain dropped to reveal a smoky stage with two women dancing on either side of a cage containing a lion. Not a sleepy one, mind you. This beast was jumpy. After a shot of the audience, a clever piece of misdirection by the director Spike Lee, the focus returned to the stage where one of the women opened a cage door slowly enough to let your mind wander to worst-case scenarios. Then a different Katt emerged.It’s the kind of showmanship (not to mention punning) you can expect from Katt Williams. In a recent interview with Arsenio Hall, Williams, a prolific performer, said his legacy would be not as the greatest comic, but as the most original. He’s got a case. In a landscape filled with stand-ups straining to go against the grain, carving out brands as renegades, Williams is a genuine eccentric.What other superstar would open his first special on Netflix, a famously global platform, with 10 minutes of local material about Jacksonville, Fla., the town he was performing in? Or say with such conviction that there is no such thing as cancel culture. (“I’m on my fifth second chance,” he once quipped.) Or find himself in so many beefs with amiable peers. He’s called out Cedric the Entertainer and Tiffany Haddish, but his fiercest feud is with Kevin Hart. The substance of their conflict is hard to figure out, but in terms of style, Williams always comes off with more flair: He once used a video any boxing promoter would appreciate to challenge Hart to a comedy battle for $5 million.But his distinctiveness starts with his cadence, a swaggering high-pitched voice that evokes the flow of Easy-E more than it does any comic. His delivery has a rhythm, a quickening beat that, once you clue into it, can make anything funny. Along with his live-wire physicality, this is what makes him the finest arena comic of the moment. His act is not about carefully honed jokes. In his new special, which is not one of his better ones, his take on Joe Biden is that he’s old and the world war of the title is a vague battle between truth and lies that never entirely coheres into a complete thought. He pokes fun at Anthony Fauci and makes some half-baked jokes about Adam and Eve being incestuous. Williams has said he stopped performing in clubs and instead develops jokes in front of thousands of people. You can tell.The tepidness of his material here seems almost like a challenge, as if he’s saying: Watch how I can make even these jokes work.The first 10 minutes of his new hour have maybe two good punch lines, and both are about chicken wings. The remarkable part is that they are completely unconnected. Most comics would have at least used a transition to tie them together and build momentum. But whereas there are many comics who can write a tight joke, there’s only one Katt Williams. He tosses ideas out and then, through force of charisma and performance chops, makes them amusing in a way no one else could.In the first chicken wing joke, the setup leans into his preacher voice, adopting a tone of religious solemnity to explain that the world is in serious trouble, convincing you he’s about to go deep before pivoting to a punchline that delivers the news with apocalyptic exasperation: “Taco Bell’s selling chicken wings.”In the other chicken wing bit, the setup and punchline are almost incidental to what comes in between, which he delights in stretching out: He repeats lines like incantations, asks the audience to imagine a chicken, does an imitation of a chicken, and throws out disclaimers (“Look, I’m not a farmer”) and tangents. Part of what makes this so much fun is the improvisational sense he creates, the way he works off the crowd’s response, but it’s also how quickly Williams moves from silly to serious. As wonderfully goofy as his chicken impression may be, what’s really unusual about Williams is his gravity. Even in his funniest moments, he has an intensity that makes comedy dramatic. Donald Glover clearly saw this when he cast Williams in a dramatic role in “Atlanta,” for which he won an Emmy.In a typical special, the comic spends time warming up the crowd, digs in to race and racism, pokes fun at whatever president occupies the Oval Office and tells some elaborate sex jokes. Williams, who perspires as much as any comic who has ever gesticulated, attacks sex jokes with his entire body. In one of my favorite bits from “It’s Pimpin’ Pimpin’” (2008), he describes his signature sexual move as a try-anything maneuver, pantomiming a sort of one-man Rube Goldberg device.Last year, attending my first arena show since the pandemic, I saw Williams at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, doing much of the same material that is in his new special. It hit harder live. That may be because no comedian is better suited to remind you of the joys of laughing together.Like only a few other comics alive, Williams knows how to turn a huge crowd into a family affair. He buttered us up, then pushed buttons, gushing about having successfully mounted a show this size during a pandemic: “They said it couldn’t happen in New York,” Williams said. Of course, no one said that, but it felt good to hear and we all cheered ourselves.Katt Williams can seem ill at ease with the collegial small talk of show business, coming off as shy in interviews and seeming a bit awkward hosting a roast of Flavor Flav. (In a later special, he did a very funny and searching bit about feeling implicated in the racism of some of the jokes written for him.) But onstage alone, talking to a crowd, he’s smooth as can be. A seductive presence, he has that ineffable quality of stardom: a preternatural ability to connect. More