“Acting!”
“Brilliant!”
“Thank you!”
I just heard it on television in an SNL sketch with Jon Lovitz and John Lithgow about Shakesperian acting. And while that may have been the first place it existed, I know I’ve heard it somewhere before.
Help me, please, lest I go absolutely insane!
(And now we begin the countdown for this thread to leave the front page unanswered…)
astro
September 12, 2004, 5:02am
2
TheOnlySaneOne:
“Acting!”
“Brilliant!”
“Thank you!”
I just heard it on television in an SNL sketch with Jon Lovitz and John Lithgow about Shakesperian acting. And while that may have been the first place it existed, I know I’ve heard it somewhere before.
Help me, please, lest I go absolutely insane!
(And now we begin the countdown for this thread to leave the front page unanswered…)
It wasn’t just “a” sketch. “ACTING!” was a running sketch that went on for some time. The one you mentioned was only one of several and there were several before it. You may be conflating the earlier instance you remember with one of those earlier shows.
http://today.uci.edu/Features/profile_detail.asp?key=35
Looking back, Lovitz says, "I feel fortunate in my career that I had really great teachers, some of whom had gone to Yale – Robert Cohen, Ashley Carr, Stuart Duckworth and William Needles, who was an actor from Canada who had done a lot of Shakespeare. I based a lot of Master Thespian on him.
And the closest I can get from Shakespeare on acting:
Hamlet: Don’t be too tame, either. Let your own common sense guide you. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; but don’t overdo it. Anything overdone strays far from the purpose of acting, which is primarily to hold a mirror up to life to reflect virtue, contempt, and the spirit of the times. Overacting or bad timing–though it might make the unsophisticated laugh–cannot make the sophisticated grieve. A negative reaction from the judicious, sophisticated theatergoers should be of greater concern than a positive reaction from all the others. O, I have seen players who have been highly praised by others but who cannot rightly be called human beings–not Christian, not pagan, not men at all–because of their strutting and bellowing and their abominable imitation of humanity. I don’t mean to be blasphemous, but these actors seem to have been made by bumbling journeymen assisting God, not God Himself.
I can picture Master Thespian saying that!
Cannot find a quote with just “ACTING!” shortest and closest famous quotes:
I love acting. It is so much more real than life. - Oscar Wilde
I have to act to live. -Sir Lawrence Olivier