Modern Scream (great title: movie-mag trashiness crossed with primal therapy) is not the usual recorded-live-stage-show-comedy album, as Lily Tomlin's first two albums were. It's a conceptual work—a movie with Lily Tomlin in every frame. The plot structure is an interview in which the Hidden History of Tomlin's life is revealed. (Actually, concealed.)…

All of Tomlin's characters are twisted, but like Robert Altman, with whom she worked on Nashville, she does not hang them on hooks of contempt for our amusement; their kinks are painted with tender strokes….

[This is] the true subject of Modern Scream: having your fame and still maintaining your inner equilibrium. As it says in the Label of Contents: "Lily talks intimately to reporter, reveals nothing." Not quite nothing. Interviewer: "Did it seem strange … making love to a man on the big screen?" Tomlin: "You don't have to be [a heterosexual] to play one...