Stand up comedy: Robin Williams live on Broadway

Sharper and deeper than Robin Williams's previous road material, Live on Broadway is a mature comedian's view of all things to do with power, prejudice, and paranoia in the 21st century. On the anthrax scare of 2001: "The Senate cleared out of their building but told the rest of us, 'Get on with your normal lives!'" On his solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over Jerusalem: "Time share!" On the pitfalls of America's deepening alliance with Britain: "The House of Commons is like Congress with a two-drink minimum." A viewer may have to slog through Williams's tedious breast fetishism, but patience is quickly rewarded with bitchy takes on Martha Stewart facing prison, solid satire about French existentialist judges at the Olympics, and subversive op-eds about the Bush administration's inability to clarify terrorist threats to the public ("Has the CIA become the Central Intuitive Agency?"). --Tom Keogh