Word: braining
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...bring to nervous therapeutics a new power-the poetic fluid," Madame Guillet announced. Her science is based on Berillon's theory of cerebral balance. This theory contends that, in the perfectly adjusted human, the right half of the brain, containing will power and reason, exactly balances the left half, which encompasses man's sentimental and mystical qualities. When one side greatly outweighs the other, psychological disorders result...
Madame Guillet divides poetry's healing properties into rhythm, sonority and inspiration. Read or heard in the proper prescription and doses, it affects the "poetic fluid" in such a way that the brain recovers its equilibrium and nervous disturbances are cured...
...Allen persistently regards himself as "just a man who can write good comedy lines." This certainty about his limitations descends, like a black hole, to the bottom of his brain. It allows the very basis of his thinking a cold, immediate access to the facts of living. Certainly few entertainers are so comfortlessly close to reality as Allen; still fewer are crowded so hard by sanity. Often his wit appears to be a cushion against hard fact. More often it seems an act of reprisal. He hurls it, rich with cyanic rancors, in the face of sham wherever he sees...
...Senator Beauregard Claghorn (Kenny Delmar), a julep-slupping burlesque of a Southern politico, a latter-day Civil Warrior with a mouth as big as the Mississippi's and a brain the size of a hominy grit. The Senator's development has been arrested in an artistic sense, too. After only six minutes on the air (four programs), his "That's a joke, son!" and "That is" were national bywords. Allen, who intended the Senator to have a far larger comic vocabulary, has been forced to give the public what it wants: plenty of nothing...
...jokesmith of his day is a six-foot gag-&-stunt machine named Milton Berle (rhymes with churl). His 38-year-old brain is a tight-packed file of some 50,000 jokes and japes. With never-miss efficiency, Berle can dip into these mental files, yank out just the gag he wants when he wants it. The "Thief of Badgags" (as spiteful rivals call him), who has probably lured more people into nightclubs than any performer alive, is now making his sixth attempt in 18 years to lure listeners to their radios with a Berle show...