Stand-up chain started in Los Angeles / SUN 2-4-18 / Condition for filmdom's Rain Man / Brass instrument with mellow sound / Novo Ogaryovo is official one of Russian president

Constructor: David Levinson Wilk

Relative difficulty: Very Easy


THEME:"Cracking Wise" — answers all relate to comedy AND the "Y"s in the answers are "cracked" to become "V" and "I" in the crosses:

Theme answers:

• THAT'S HYSTERICAL (23A: "Stop! You're killing me!") / VINE
• FUNNY OR DIE (31A: Internet home to "Between Two Ferns") / AVIAS
• DRY SENSE OF HUMOR (50A: A person skilled at deadpan has one) / ELVIS
• EVERYBODY'S A COMEDIAN (67A: Unimpressed response to someone's one-liner) / AVIS + OVID
• THE LAUGH FACTORY (86A: Stand-up chain started in Los Angeles) / E-VITE
• YO MAMA JOKE (100A: It might involve someone being "so poor" or "so old") / VICTOR
• I WAS ONLY KIDDING (115A: "Jeez ... lighten up!") / DEVISE 

Word of the Day: DEREK Walcott (78D:___ Walcott, Nobel Prize-winning poet)—

Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature,^[3] the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015. (wikipedia)

I imagine this puzzle will have some fans today, both because the theme has a cleverness about it and because it was super duper easy, so people will feel warmly disposed toward it. I would also have enjoyed the puzzle, I think, if it had a. been smaller (say, a W or a Th) and b. had cleaner fill (there's just too much NEROS ISE RICAN ACARD-type stuff). If the title had been a revealer in a smaller puzzle with clean fill, I would be singing its praises. But the theme wore thin for me—felt like being bludgeoned by the same concept over and over and over—and there wasn't enough about the fill to compensate for the bludgeoning. I like that the "cracking wise" concept related not just to the cracking of the letter "Y" into two letters (in the Downs) but also to the comedy theme throughout. It felt a teeny bit like cheating when non-comedy words, like "factory" or "Yo" or "only," were the ones with the "Y" that was cracked, but you gotta do what you gotta do, especially on a Sunday when you've got a Gigantic grid to fill. I want to acknowledge, and praise, the fact that there are no uncracked "Y"s in the entire grid. That would've bummed me out.


Since the puzzle was so easy, I didn't see the comedy theme at all until very late. Got the "Y" gag at "YNE" (24D: Poison ivy, e.g.) (me: "YNE ... wtf is YNE? That's not a word, f---! Check cross ... check cross, yep ... check cross ... they're all correct. YNE!" I was "Y"-ning. Then I saw the VINE, and it opened up my eyes, I saw the VINE. And so the rest of the puzzle was just a sprint with a few "Y" / "VI" booby traps thrown in. But because I didn't see the comedy theme, I had real trouble imagining what the hell kind of FACTORY it could be. My knowledge of FACTORY chains ends at THE CHEESECAKE. But all I had to do was run the short Downs—LIRE / ADO / USO—and THE LAUGH came into view. PIA was scary because even though all the crosses checked, it felt wrong. But it worked. No bumps, no bruises. Too many plural names (AARONS, RENES, NEROS) and too many A-something partials (ACARD, AHERO), and even though there's only one -STER, that's really one too many. I think Sundays are just hard to do well all the way through. If everything's not perfect, there's just ... more. More answers, more space, more room to screw things up. This one just went on too long and wasn't quite strong enough. A smaller version might've worked fine. Here, I got tired. OK, bye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. gah, I *knew* I'd seen the "VI"-for-"Y" gimmick before, but didn't bother to go hunting. Luckily my friend Erin did, and it was the NYT itself that ran the puzzle ... and just two years ago (second time in recent days that the NYT has recycled a puzzle concept less than 2 years old ...). Here's that grid, from the Thursday, Sep. 29, 2016 puzzle (as you can see there's a "DD"-for-"B" thing going on too...):

Puzzle by Jonathan Kaye Screenshot from crosswordfiend.com

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