Word: ad-lib
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...count on the fact that Cosell and ABC were running a high risk. A live prime-time show is so out of the ken of the current TV generation that most people have forgotten its limitations. Timing each act to the nanosecond becomes vital; the stars' ability to ad-lib gracefully and wittily is crucial; many stars, accustomed to the adjustments of video tape, regard live performance as a jump without...
...Today is expected to be more than just a good newsman, of course. Says Co-Host Walters: "The person must be able to do interviews and ad-lib those awful 30 seconds at the end of the show." He must also supply what Schulberg calls "chemical balance" to the stand-up comic pace of Today Reviewer Gene Shalit and the alternately sweet-and-strident Walters. And he must bring himself to do commercials...
...Charleston contests during the '20s, then graduated to the big-band circuit as a comedian. Portraying the angry, fast-talking fat man (his weight yo-yoed between 200 and 330 lbs.), he eventually became a frequent TV guest whose comedy format never varied-a skeleton routine augmented by ad-lib insults to audience and fellow performers alike. "I could be funny for hours on your show," he once told a rival comic, "but I wouldn't want to change the format...
...held in higher esteem as masters of governmental management than is Elliot Lee Richardson, 52, the next Secretary of Defense-even though almost no one can adequately explain just why. The public Richardson is stuffily Bostonian, serenely confident, vaguely remote. His set speeches are bloodless and dull. His ad-lib language is so convoluted, yet grammatically correct, that one questioner at a Senate committee hearing jokingly confessed that he could not quite tell from a Richardson answer whether he was for, or against, drug abuse. Moreover, Richardson has been appointed to so many high posts (five in the past...
...idea is that these blazer-clad performers are just naturally bright and witty, able to ad-lib at precisely the right or occasionally the wrong time. Sometimes they dress up in funny costumes or become an encounter group, flinging insults, paper airplanes, even snowballs at each other. At program's end, while the credits roll, they all mill around the top banana's desk as if to continue the office party they had interrupted to go on camera. Much of this spontaneity is, of course, carefully scripted. And the journalistic japesters are heavily advertised with cornball photos...