Rosie Complexion
By Laurie Stone
The Rosie O'Donnell Show
Weekdays, 10 a.m., ABC
The buzz goes that Rosie O'Donnell is a big hit on daytime because her show
harkens back to a simpler time, the era of Mike Douglas and Merv
Griffin--before Oprahfication and the big spill. In fact, she's delivering
the realness that talk shows fake. Disclosures on those programs are staged,
ritualized, about as spontaneous as high mass. O'Donnell is all gut, and
viewers are responding to her authenticity. She is New York: goony for
Broadway musicals, hip to queerness and the polyglot melt. The casts of Rent
and Noise/Funk have already performed sets, and though these shows are hot,
they also declare her taste. When Fran Dresher was a guest, a remote picked
up her parents, Morty and Sylvia, reviewing early-bird specials in South
Florida, the best deal--with all courses lustily described--earning a
four-knish rating. The Dreshers were back the next week and are slated for an
eating campaign through New Orleans. O'Donnell isn't beaming out white bread
to the heartland but raisin-walnut pumpernickel.
She teases that her show is totally original, introducing her band leader
as Doc Severinsen, referring to her producer as Gelman, shattering windows
with a tossed pencil. Sure her format is a late-night variant--with guests
performing and trotting over to the desk for a chat. But her daily hour,
broadcast live, isn't like any other, because it's much less shtick-driven,
emanating almost entirely from her personality. She does an opening
monologue, but she's never had a knack for the practiced timing of telling
jokes. She doesn't act funny, and is rather ineffable, riffing off
conversations, tunneling back, rootswise, to George Burns and Groucho.
A couple of years ago, Paula Poundstone fashioned a nighttime hour around
her personality, and it bombed. She gave off no libido of any kind. In the
stand-up world--with her tomboy galumph, bow ties, and vests--she's been a
mascot in the boy's locker room, chucked on the chin, protected. Crouching
awkwardly on the set of her show or draping herself over a stool, her body
offered the bargain: I won't touch you, if you keep your hands off me. The
atmosphere had no edge.
O'Donnell, too, is sexually masked; she comes across all gut but not the
entire gut--like a lot of comedians. Perhaps overt sex dissolves comedy. Name
a really id-rocking comedian, male or female. Maybe Dennis Miller, who is as
helplessly vain as he is acerbic. Libido wafts off him, but in most comedians
it's shadowy, and sexual starving is part of their bond with us. They admit
they don't get no satisfaction, and we let them stand apart and make us come,
in the way that laughing is a little like getting off: the spasm, the
exhalation of air, the squealing. I don't have to spell it out.
O'Donnell isn't sexual but is plenty libidinous, diving into appetite,
hoisting her smarts and bents. The large women of daytime--Oprah, Carnie
Wilson, and ex-fatty Ricki Lake--are humiliated by their bodies. O'Donnell
calls herself fat and neither weeps nor apologizes for liking food. She isn't
about to trade her authority for a seat at a 12-step sisterhood. Internal
voices don't censor her. She breaks into song and impressions whenever she
feels it, her head a satellite dish receiving beeps only she can detect.
She's telling Vanessa Williams she liked Eraser, because she could follow the
plot, when a subliminal aside shoots out of her mouth, "I didn't need Cliff
Notes, like for some summer movies I won't mention...Tom Cruise...because we
want him on the show." Another day Donny Osmond calls her fat, and in almost
every subsequent program she nails his boorishness, gleefully punctuating the
dig with a Betty Rubble cackle.
She's hog-happy with her hungers, whether for Drake's cakes or TV
trivia--O'Donnell is Joan Rivers without the self-loathing. Is there a sitcom
theme song she cannot summon, a 20-year soap plot she can't unfurl? Susan
Lucci comes on, and O'Donnell wants only to truffle for nuggets about Pine
Valley. When first guest George Clooney quips, "I'm here because Madonna
couldn't make it," O'Donnell snaps back, "That's true," then asks if he's
scared about being the third Batman in his upcoming movie--"You know, like
being the second Darren on Bewitched."
Her show plays like an extended K-Mart commercial--those improvisational
gems, concocted with fellow Noo Yawker Penny Marshall, the depressed, laconic
counterpart to O'Donnell's ebullient street kid. The commercials are sly,
seeming more genuine than the programs they interrupt and casting women who
act like backyard neighbors but whom everyone knows are showbiz big shots.
O'Donnell doesn't falsify either side of herself, she works the tension. Like
every original, her art combines the recognizable and the skewed.
She wants acceptance but doesn't truckle, admonishing her live audience,
"Don't clap unless you mean it. This isn't Sally Jessy Raphael." O'Donnell
is principled--following the O.J. verdict, she condemned the soft-pedaling of
violence against women--but she isn't pious, recently dissing Kato for lying
and at the same time acknowledging his charm. Besotted by her adopted son
Parker, she gushes without patting herself on the back, a la Kathie Lee.
Skirting sentimentality, O'Donnell revels in her guests, and the lineups have
been impressive, from buddies Janeane Garofalo, Dana Carvey, and Martin Short
to talk-show forebear Virginia Graham, looking Jurassic but sassing spryly.
O'Donnell's guest lists have sparked the denied rumor that Live With Regis
and Kathie Lee started a booking war with the new show, refusing guests who
came on O'Donnell's program first.
People go on Letterman in a state of fascinated terror, not knowing whether
the host will fawn over, yawn at, or bite them. Many of the guests on Regis
and Kathie Lee strain against leaking condescension at their hosts'
platitudes. Rosie, clearly, has made friends in entertainment, and audiences
are responding with similar affection for her big, smart, heartfelt,
unembarrassed presence. What has paved her success isn't a yearning for
simplicity but an openness to what is independent, urban, unmarried,
imposing.
Photo caption: A desk of her own.
credit: Melissa Cooperman.
Copyright © 1996 VV Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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