“When Mr. Rickles developed his stand-up act in the 1950s, his humor was considered shocking, with a raw, abrasive, deeply personal edge. If he wasn’t the first “insult comic,” he was by far the most successful and most widely imitated, becoming a fixture on television and in nightclubs for decades.”
Why Authoritarians Attack The Arts
University of Chicago sociologist Eve L. Ewing: “Art creates pathways for subversion, for political understanding and solidarity among coalition builders. Art teaches us that lives other than our own have value. … Authoritarian leaders throughout history have intuited this fact and have acted accordingly.”
English National Opera ‘Would Not Survive’ Without Musicals, Says Producer Who Does Musicals There
Michael Linnit, who co-produces the musicals presented at the Coliseum, ENO’s home theatre (and London’s largest), said the company “only produces its opera six months of the year, so we facilitate those six months by taking in musicals, producing a lot of money for it. … It [ENO] would not survive without the additional rental weeks.”
Writers Look, Whereas Painters See. But There’s A Link
“Of all the arts, writers most envy music, for being both abstract and immediate, and also in no need of translation. But painting might come a close second, for the way that the expression and the means of expression are coterminous—whereas novelists are stuck with the one-damn-thing-after-another need for word and sentence and paragraph and background and psychological buildup in order to heftily construct that climactic scene.”