President at RTC Dinner

Sarko: a punch line

Amid France’s Woes, Satirists Turn to Sarkozy, as a Punch Line Comedians’ growing boldness is a sign of unhappiness with the government as it struggles with rising unemployment and worker anger.

In a time of economic crisis, and in the absence of effective political opposition, there is derision — of those in power, especially the king. That is not to say that revolution is around the corner, but simply that humor punctures power and helps to cure a sense of powerlessness.

Laughter can be good medicine.

This elected king, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, with his aggressive personality, is a seemingly endless fount of material for the satirists, whose increasing boldness is a sign of deeper unhappiness with the government as it struggles with rising unemployment and worker anger.

“We comedians are lucky to have someone colorful and easy to caricature, a little like American comedians with George Bush,” said Stéphane Guillon, one of the fiercest satirists now working in France. “Sarkozy is a godsend for comedians, and if I exaggerate I should say that Sarko is a treasure chest of blunders all by himself. I really don’t know how to thank him.”

What with his body language (although that might be so French the French don't find it funny, still it seems so rich a lode to mine), his pronouncements and his arrogance, he seems, well, easy to caricature.

Mr. Sarkozy has brought an unrestrained crassness to the presidency that has unleashed comedians, Mr. Guillon said.

Unrestrained crassness; interesting term.

Mr. Guillon tried to explain what he portrayed as Mr. Sarkozy’s obsession with President Obama this way: “It’s kind of understandable. For months, Sarkozy was the leader of Europe. Of the world even. And now he’s forced to be just the president of France. I hope we’ll be good enough for him.” After six months of dealing with the Middle East and the Caucasus, “now he has to try to resolve our little problems of losers, unemployment, social security. “You get the feeling we’re annoying him sometimes.”

Danny Gans, Impressionist

Aaron Mayes/Las Vegas Sun, via Associated Press
Danny Gans performing at the Mirage in Las Vegas in 2000

Fascinating life story.


May 2, 2009
Danny Gans, Impressionist, Dies at 52
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Danny Gans, whose seemingly bottomless repertory of impressions, some of them spoken but most of them sung, made him one of the top headliners on the Las Vegas Strip, died on Friday at his home in Henderson, Nev. He was 52.

The death was confirmed by Jennifer Dunne, a spokeswoman for Wynn Resorts, which hired Mr. Gans early this year to perform at its new Encore resort.

A Clark County coroner’s spokeswoman told The Associated Press that an autopsy was pending, but a police spokesman, Todd Rasmussen, said that foul play was not suspected in Mr. Gans’s sudden death.

Mr. Gans was a show business anomaly, virtually unknown outside Las Vegas but a superstar on the Strip, performing to capacity crowds at one hotel-casino after another since being hired by the Stratosphere in 1996.

Aggressively promoted on billboards, taxi-top advertisements and a marquee at the Encore measuring 70 feet by 70 feet, Mr. Gans was an inescapable name and face for the millions of tourists and gamblers who visit the Strip each year, and one of the hottest tickets in town.

Five nights a week, 46 weeks a year, he took the stage and treated audiences to a carefully calibrated mixture of song and comedy, delivering, like a human iPod, as many as 60 vocal impersonations of singers as varied as Frank Sinatra, Rod Stewart and Anita Baker.

“In his performance uniform of dark suit, red socks and black-and-white spectator shoes, Gans comes across as a friendly, eager-to-please fella, with a bright perma-grin,” The Las Vegas Sun wrote in a review of his act at the Encore in March. “His niche is comfort-zone entertainment, avoiding anything even faintly controversial, usually aiming for the sentimental jugular.”

That combination earned him an estimated $15 million to $20 million a year.

Mr. Gans grew up in Torrance, Calif., and set his sights on becoming a third baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers. In pursuit of this dream, he played baseball in the late 1970s at Mount San Antonio College in Walnut, Calif., and California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

While playing third base for the Victoria Mussels in British Columbia, a Class A team that is now defunct, he was spiked in the Achilles tendon and, hobbled, gave up on baseball. His father, Sid, who had once entertained in the Catskills, encouraged him to use his talent for mimicry to develop a stage act.

Mr. Gans tried his luck in stand-up clubs, but he hated the hours and the dirty jokes, which did not square with the Christian beliefs he had embraced while recuperating from his injury. Instead he began offering his blend of comedy and impressions to audiences at corporate events. His clean, inoffensive humor and grab bag of impressions translated into a lucrative, if uncelebrated, career.

He appeared in small roles in films and on television, most visibly as Dean Martin in the 1992 CBS mini-series “Sinatra.” Doing double duty, he also provided the singing voice for the actor playing Sammy Davis Jr. On film, he finally realized his baseball ambitions by playing the role of Deke, third baseman for the Durham Bulls, in “Bull Durham.”

In 1981 he married Julie Russell, who survives him, as do their three children, Amy, Andrew and Emily, and his sister, Peggy Gans of Los Alamitos, Calif.

In 1995 Mr. Gans took his act to New York, in the one-man show “Danny Gans on Broadway.” It closed after six performances, but he struck gold when the Stratosphere hired him the next year as its permanent headliner.

As it turned out, audiences were hungry for a good impressionist, a niche left vacant since the heyday of Rich Little. Mr. Gans freshened the genre by including contemporary acts like Aaron Neville and Hootie and the Blowfish, along with standbys like Tony Bennett and Louis Armstrong. He could pluck the heartstrings with a tribute to George Burns, channel Kermit the Frog in a heartfelt rendition of “The Rainbow Connection” and chew the scenery as Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman.”

Mr. Gans moved on to the Rio Hotel, then in 2000 took up residence in his own theater at the Mirage. In February he moved to the Encore Theater, where audiences paid $90 to $120 to see him and, routinely, rewarded him with a standing ovation.

Obama, Peres, Colbert on Persian New Year

By Robert Mackey

Update | 1:06 p.m. In President Barack Obama’s videotaped message to the Iranian people on Friday — which can be seen with Farsi subtitles on the Web site of Radio Farda, a broadcaster financed by the American government — he discusses the celebration of the Persian New Year, Norouz, which began today. (Readers in Iran: Happy 1388!)

Mr. Obama’s video outreach is currently the lead story on the English-language Web site of Press TV, Iran’s state-sponsored satellite broadcaster. In an interesting sign of connection via the Web, the report on the Iranian site links directly to the video on the White House Web site.

Notable in Mr. Obama’s message is his reference to the words of Saadi, a revered Persian poet. Near the end of his remarks, Mr. Obama said:

I know that this won’t be reached easily. There are those who insist that we be defined by our differences. But let us remember the words that were written by the poet Saadi, so many years ago: “The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.”

Saadi lived and wrote in what the Persian calendar counts as the 7th century (in the West, the 13th), and there is a shrine to him in the Iranian city of Shiraz, where he died. The American travel writer Rick Steves recently visited Saadi’s tomb in Shiraz. Video of the shrine, and of Iranians reading his poetry there can be seen at the very end of this YouTube clip and the very beginning of this one. Mr. Steves notes that Saadi was known for his extensive travels, which exposed him to many different cultures.

Mr. Obama was quoting from a translation Saadi’s poem “Bani A’dam.” The full text of the poem has been rendered into English in several varying translations. During the siege of Sarajevo in 1994, Anthony Lewis quoted the poem in full in a column in The Times. Marizeh Ghiasi, a blogger in Canada who was born in Tehran, published this translation, beneath an image of the original Persian script on her blog:

The children of Adam are the limbs of one body
That share an origin in their creation
When one limb passes its days in pain
The other limbs cannot remain easy
You who feel no pain at the suffering of others
It is not fitting for you to be called human

This message of connectedness, situated in the Iranian and Muslim traditions, is interestingly similar to what was perhaps the central moment of Mr. Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He sought to define the role of government in a similar way, invoking a tenet of the Judeo-Christian tradition:

Alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga: a belief that we’re all connected as one people. If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

It is that fundamental belief: I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, that makes this country work.

Ynetnews, the Web site of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, reports on Friday that Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, also broadcast a message to the Iranian people: “partly in Farsi, urging them to ‘return to enlightened world’.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz adds that Mr. Peres’ message “was broadcast on Israel Radio’s Farsi channel, which enjoys a wide audience in the Farsi-speaking world.” (In 2008 Israel Radio moved its foreign-language offerings to the Web and stopped all shortwave radio broadcasts except for those in Farsi.) As Alan Cowell notes in The Times today, “Both messages suggested that there was a place for Iran as an equal in the international community.”

But political leaders were not the only ones to make televised addresses in recent days touching on the Persian New Year. Last week, Stephen Colbert objected to the fact that his image was being used to sell clothes in Tehran without his permission, mainly on the basis that it was a violation of “the true meaning of Norouz:”

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Rudy Ray Moore, 81, Precursor of Rap

There is a website, of course. And an "official" one, as well.


Mr. Moore called himself the Godfather of Rap because of the number of hip-hop artists who used snippets of his recordings in theirs, performed with him or imitated him. These included Dr. Dre, Big Daddy Kane and 2 Live Crew.

Snoop Dogg thanked Mr. Moore in liner notes to the 2006 release of the soundtrack to Mr. Moore’s 1975 film, “Dolemite,” saying, “Without Rudy Ray Moore, there would be no Snoop Dogg, and that’s for real.”

While very little of his work reached mainstream audiences, some knew of his work. Snoop did.

Mr. Moore could be said to represent a profound strand of African-American folk art. One of his standard stories concerns a monkey who uses his wiles and an accommodating elephant to fool a lion. The tale, which originated in West Africa, became a basis for an influential study by the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism.”

Hewlett-Woodmere Library owns the book.

In one of his few brushes with a national audience, Mr. Moore, in a startlingly cleaned-up version, told the story on “The Arsenio Hall Show” in the early 1990s. Other characters he described were new, almost always dirtier renderings in the tradition of trickster stories represented by Brer Rabbit and the cunning slave John, who outwitted his master to win freedom.

Rudy Ray Moore as the title character in “Dolemite” (1975), a cult classic among aficionados of blaxploitation movies.

George Carlin, Comic Who Chafed at Society and Its Constraints, Dies at 71

I remember seeing Carlin on the Johnny Carson Show numerous times, perhaps even when he still wore a jacket and tie.

“By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth,” read a message on Mr. Carlin’s Web site, GeorgeCarlin.com, and he spent much of his life in a fervent effort to counteract the forces that would have it so. In his always irreverent, often furious social commentary, in his observations of the absurdities of everyday life and language, and in groundbreaking routines like the profane “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” he took aim at what he thought of as the palliating and obfuscating agents of American life — politicians, advertisements, religion, the media and conventional thinking of all stripes.

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NBC, via Associated Press

George Carlin served as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975. More Photos »

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George Carlin, 1937-2008

I had lost my taste for him, and never had HBO, but I do remember him fondly.