Track Listing

1. Let's Talk Dirty to the Animals
2. Audition/I Love to Be Unhappy
3. Don Kirshner/Rhonda Weiss Introduction/Goodbye Saccharine
4. Lisa Loopner Piano Recital: "The Way We Were"
5. If You Look Close/Gimme Mick
6. Emily Litella
7. Roseanne Roseannadanna
8. Honey (Touch Me with My Clothes On)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #337579 in Music
• Released on: 1995-01-24
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Live, Import

Customer Reviews

The One and Only
She was born in 1946 in Detroit, Michigan, and after a stint with Second City shot to stardom as one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live: a little slip of a thing with ordinary-girl-next-door looks, a cockerspaniel hairstyle, and twinkling eyes. And a charming, touching vulnerability that combined with a truly subversive sense of humor and a talent that was completely at home with the greatest comic artists of her generation. America's Sweetheart, suddenly, impossibly dead of ovarian cancer in 1989 at age 42.

GILDA RADNER: LIVE FROM NEW YORK extracts portions of her 1980 stage show, a program in which Radner drew heavily upon the characters she had first created for Saturday Night Live--but this was no rerun; the material was new and the characters were as fresh as they were when they debuted. There's Candy Slice, Radner's wickedly funny take-off on Patti Smith, Priestess of Punk; the sinus-afflicted teenager Lisa Loopner, who becomes overwrought during a piano recital; the slightly deaf and eternally confused Emily Litella, who suddenly finds herself working as a substitute teacher in a most unpleasant school; and Roseanne Roseannadanna, an aggressively obnoxious news commentator, delivering a commencement speech at (of all places) Columbia University.

All of these sketches have their charms, but to my mind the best selections from this recording are those in which Gilda Radner is just Gilda Radner, completely unencumbered by the necessity of creating an alter-ego. The opening "Let's Talk Dirty to the Animals" is bright, cheery, and hilariously obscene; "I Love to Be Unhappy" is a classic of bright desperation; and the closing "Honey (Touch Me With My Clothes On)" is an incredibly charming bit of nostalgia, a recollection of early highschool romances in a more innocent time.

If I have a complaint with this recording, it is that it is partial and on occasion the sketches really have to be seen as well as heard in order to fully appreciate them. This is particularly true of the Rhonda Wiess character, a Long Island Jewish princess furious at the FDA for banning saccharine--and who utters a truly disturbing line when she comments that "statistics show men prefer skinny girls with cancer to healthy girls with bulging thighs." At the time, the line got a tremendous laugh. Today it leaves you with a sharp wince of irony and a trace of tragedy.

Sadly, Radner never really had time to find the post-Saturday Night Fame which surely would have been hers: a few minor roles in minor films, a few television appearances, and suddenly it was over. But her unique brand of joyful innocence and sly humor remains intact both here and in other venues, where she is forever loveable, forever young, and absolutely, unspeakably funny. Recommended.

--GFT (Amazon.com Reviewer)--