Comedian

Abandon Hope? Not in this lifetime. Fortunately, when it comes to Bob Hope, it has proven to be a good, long life. The man who quite possibly has entertained more people than William Shakespeare (and the playwright didn't make half as many personal appearances), mastered nearly every 20th-century show-business medium and influenced every other comedian in the past five decades (whether they want to admit it or not) turns 100 today. Happy birthday, Mr. Hope. Reaching the century mark is no small accomplishment, but Hope's long life is made more impressive by all that he's squeezed into it. No entertainer has been more honored, few more genuinely loved.

"Chris Rock: Bigger & Blacker" is smaller and louder than I expected this highly publicized concert event to be.Don't get me wrong. Like almost everyone else in the world, I think Rock is a brilliant comedian. And he has moments in this concert filmed at the Apollo Theatre that, if not brilliant, are at least more bitingly insightful than almost anything this side of Richard Pryor in the 1970s or Robin Williams in the 1980s.Rock opens the concert with a red-hot sociological riff on the shootings at Columbine High in Colorado: his reminder that it was white suburban teen-age boys doing all that killing, not black kids living in the city.

Meshelle Foreman is right where she wants to be, on stage, making people laugh with a story from her life. This one involves an uncle who's just out of "the system" after 20 years.Uncle Skippy thinks it's 1976, Foreman says, as her sound man cues up the O'Jays' "Money." He still wears double-knit pants. Uncle Skippy doesn't walk down the street, he does one of those arm-swinging pimp rolls last seen in "Super Fly." Laughter ripples through the audience.Foreman, 28, sprinkles her story with knowing glances and asides.

George Burns, the beloved cigar-puffing comedian whose career spanned vaudeville, radio, movies and television, died yesterday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif.Mr. Burns, 100, was the foremost comic "straight man" of his time in a partnership with his late wife, the scatterbrained Gracie Allen. He began a new solo career in show business when he was nearly 80.When he was well into his 90s, Mr. Burns announced with his customary brio that he had arranged to celebrate his 100th birthday, on Jan. 20, 1996, with an engagement at the London Palladium.

For years comedian Kathy Buckley could not hear the laughs.They were out there, somewhere beyond the edge of the stage. They were there from the moment she first stepped before an audience wearing a giant, plastic hand cupped to her ear and asked why modern medical technology could not devise a more sophisticated hearing aid.She could feel the laughs in her feet, in the vibrations of the stage. But she could not hear them.Ms. Buckley, billed as the first hearing-impaired comedian to achieve national recognition, heard the laughs yesterday at Anne Arundel Community College, where she was the featured speaker in observance of National Disability Awareness Day. In the audience at the Pascal Center for Performing Arts were people in wheelchairs and a contingent of hearing-impaired people who followed Ms. Buckley's banter through a sign-language interpreter.

Richard Pryor, who revolutionized American comedy by tapping into his experiences as a black man in a white-dominated society, died of heart failure early yesterday at his home in Encino, Calif., just nine days after his 65th birthday. He had been ill for years, having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system, in 1986. There were comedians who came of age in the 1970s. And there was Mr. Pryor. Scathingly funny, bitterly angry, utterly fearless, Mr. Pryor, whom his friend Robin Williams once called "the Evel Knievel of comedy," answered to no comedic standard but his own. He became not only a trailblazer, expanding the boundaries of American humor by holding no cow sacred, but also - in a twist that amazed him endlessly - one of the best-loved comics of his time.

For Kathy Griffin, fame - even a self-proclaimed D-list fame - has its advantages. "It's great getting known so that people know what to expect," Griffin says. KATHY GRIFFIN / / 8 p.m. Wednesday. Lyric Opera House, 140 W. Mount Royal Ave. $28-$58. 410-547-SEAT or ticketmaster.com.

Four men in a night doing standup comedy, that's a show. Four women, that's - what? A statement? Perhaps. It's definitely the 2001 Women in Comedy Festival, a fourth-annual event benefiting My Sister's Place, a Washington shelter for battered women, that gives the evening a certain thematic charge. "Battered women have absolutely no voice whatsoever," says comedian Judy Gold, who will serve as master of ceremonies, doing her own set and introducing Paula Poundstone, Rene Hicks and Joy Behar.

Rodney Dangerfield, who earned the respect of comedians and audiences everywhere by insisting he never got any, died yesterday of complications after undergoing heart surgery at a Los Angeles hospital. The 82-year-old comedian, whose bulging eyes, rapid-fire delivery and always-too-tight shirt collar proved comic gold for nearly four decades, had been operated on at UCLA Medical Center Aug. 25 to have a heart valve replaced. He lapsed into a coma after the operation, suffering a small stroke and developing infectious and abdominal complications, publicist Kevin Susaki said.

So definite a type is actor Mario Cantone that some of the wacky roles he's played were written just for him, including Anthony, the swishy wedding planner in HBO's Sex and the City, and Gidger, the combustive editorial assistant in The Violet Hour on Broadway. A frequent guest on ABC's The View, Cantone is becoming a favorite to do the morning-after skewering of entertainment awards shows. The short, feisty, energetic comedian has just written something for himself. No surprise, it's a huge, over-the-top starring role - the only role, in fact, in Laugh Whore at Broadway's Cort Theatre.