His delivery was flat. His beady eyes revealed a mind constantly at work. Andy Kaufman threw every joke away -- he delivered bad lines, well, badly. Herein lay the source of his genius: he committed to the premise of the joke and ignored punchlines as byproducts of the comedic process. Every bad gag,

Bombast, Clever, Excessive, In-your-face, Rebel, Wise assy

David Lynch has been charged with making incomprehensible films. In fact, they make perfect sense, but not necessarily to us. An exemplary scene in "Fire Walk with Me" (1992) shows this: Two investigators are to receive their assignment from a very odd-looking woman named Lil. What they receive from

Anxiety, Dreamy, Enigmatic, Hallucinatory, Perverse, Quirky, Surreal, Surrealist film

David Letterman influenced the comic sensibility of an entire generation (according to the presenter of his 1992 Peabody Award) by taking "one of TV's most conventional and least inventive forms -- the talk show -- and infusing it with freshness and imagination." Letterman always dreamed of hosti

Clever, Funny, Ironic, Wise assy, Witty

TV screens may have gone color in the '60s, but TV actors didn't -- the small screen remained a white, white world. It remained white-washed in terms of subject matter, as well: no controversy, no politics, and no racial prejudice (because, of course, there were no people of color). That all changed

Charming, Funny, Pioneering, Political