About James Wolcott: James Wolcott is an American journalist, known for his critique of contemporary media. Wolcott is the cultural critic for Vanity Fair and contributes to The New Yorker. He also writes a blog.
Being raised Catholic in a pressure-cooker household besieged by alcohol and bill collectors enforced and heightened a sense of sentry duty in me, the oldest of five children and the one most responsible for keeping everything from capsizing. Wild in...
What a turnaround in sentiment 'Glee' exemplifies. It was only a few years ago that pursuing the dream of a Broadway career or cabaret stardom relegated some poor yearning dope to a lavender ghetto of losers, self-deluders, and social rejects.
A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped...
Historically, Hollywood comedy has arrived in skinny envelopes. From fence post Buster Keaton to herky-jerky Jerry Lewis to wiry nerve-bundle Woody Allen to hung-loose Richard Pryor to whippy contortionist Jim Carrey, its comics and clowns have tende...
Stars wide of belt often cultivated a gentlemanly grandeur, a groomed refinement that filtered through their fingertips - the dainty fidgets of Hardy's plump digits, Orson Welles performing magic tricks with nimble dexterity, Jackie Gleason lofting a...
One reason I'm such a wayward prognosticator of rightwing trends is that I'm incapable of blacking out enough neural sectors to see the world through reptilian-brained eyes, a prerequisite for any true channeling of the mean resentments and implanted...
It was with 9/11 that I came to fully appreciate and embrace NPR's irreplaceability as a sanity preserver, its unique virtues as first responder on the burning scene.
Telling writers to shut up is a sure way to keep them talking.
Many questions torment America in its dark night of the soul, questions more urgently pressing, and yet it must be asked: How did we get stuck with Piers Morgan? Who is he, why is he here, is he returnable?
I try to avoid Politico to spare myself psoriasis of the brain but so many journalists cite it that I'm forced to be aware of it no matter how big a moat I build.
Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.
If Broadway no longer seems behind the times or ahead of the times, it may be because there are no 'times' anymore, no prevailing Zeitgeist that sets the fashion, pace, and prevailing look.
The Beltway media went into caroming-off-the-walls hysterics over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, whipping itself into a flaming casserole even as Clinton's standing with the American people remained upright and firm, so to speak.
The unhappy irony is that, while 'Glee' is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues.
Truman Capote was a pop figure, but it wasn't until he went on David Susskind's show and had that extraordinary voice and manner that everyone could imitate, that he really took off as a figure.
If you were to hold me down and tickle me to pick my favorite 'plus-comic,' it would have to be Kevin James, a broad physical pratfaller capable of deadpan underplay, a technique honed from years of reaction-shot close-ups on TV, where every teeny fr...
Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with 'Hardly Working' and 'Cracking Up.'
Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream.
There was a time when idealistic folksingers such as myself believed that Reality TV was a programming vogue that would peak and recede, leaving only its hardiest show-offs. Instead, it has metastasized like toxic mold, filling every nook and opening...
People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.
Bad acting comes in many bags, various odors. It can be performed by cardboard refugees from an Ed Wood movie, reciting their dialogue off an eye chart, or by hopped-up pros looking to punch a hole through the fourth wall from pure ballistic force of...
