Too much of today’s audience knows this comic heavyweight from his uninspired turns on terrible television like Family Feud and Celebrity Diving. But in his day, he was an inspired comic in the Bill Cosby mold: a gentle yet endlessly funny storyteller with a specialty in family-based, childhood-memory comedy. This 1989 Showtime special captures him at his peak, and his Thanksgiving dinner and garage-saleing-with-Mom bits are unsung classics.
Whoopi — who, lest we forget, used to be very funny — followed up her 1985 breakthrough special (more on that later) with this HBO hour in which she resurrected one of the earlier show’s most popular characters, the street-smart junkie (now in recovery) Fontaine. The line between the character and the performer is mighty thin, though, and this hour is mostly a showcase for the edgy topical comedy that was, for a time, Goldberg’s bread and butter.
Spade has done so many forgettable TV projects and terrible films for the Sandler factory that it’s easy to forget what a crisp, spiky stand-up he is. This 1998 HBO hour finds him in wonderfully smarmy yet personal form, joking sharply but amiably about his “dirtbag” childhood in Arizona, his deadbeat dad, and his romantic woes.45. Bobcat Goldthwait: “Is He Like That All The Time?”
Goldthwait’s profile was so high as the screeching co-star of the Police Academy movies that he never really got credit for the brilliance of his stand-up act, where the gimmick of his persona hid a finely-tuned sense of political and social satire. Now that he’s getting respect as a filmmaker, it’s high time to reassess his stand-up, starting with this masterful 1989 hour for HBO.
I known, I know. Since 9/11, Miller has repurposed himself as a far-right loon, spewing bile on talk radio and kibitzing on Fox News with Bill O’Reilly — which would be fine if he were still funny. But he was once not only very funny indeed, but an equal-opportunity satirist, mocking Republicans and Democrats with equal vigor. Why, this riotous 1988 HBO hour — his first of many for the network — even finds him (gasp) giving the business to Ronald Reagen. Don’t tell O’Reilly!
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