Al Pacino scrambles aboard the standup boat

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 2nd, 2005

The needle on the standup-is-cool-again meter jumps a notch or two with the revelation (in the Edmonton Sun) that he did standup (their wording, not ours). To wit:

“I had a certain physical comedy I did with a partner,” he recently told reporters. “But I didn’t want to be funny all the time, only when I felt like it. And that’s not a good idea.”

No, that is not a good idea.

Mr. Pacino is vague. No time, no place, no how long, no positive i.d. of this “partner.” Actually, he could be talking about sex, for all we know.

But, we note again that the prevailing attitude in Hollywood (and Edmonton!) is that it is once again approaching okay to say (to admit?) that you once were, or once thought of yourself as, a standup comic. The pendulum swings. What could account for this shift in attitude? We may start to keep a list of those folks– famous and not so– who drop the s-word in interviews and on talk show panels. Stay tuned.