Word: cavett
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Dick Cavett is the darling of people who say proudly that they never watch television. His wit is quick and responsive-it avoids the soggy, set-piece gag and flashes in reaction to what the guest has just said. When Norman Mailer once proclaimed that he was smarter than the other guests, Cavett briskly offered him another chair to contain his giant intellect. While the Jack Paars or the Merv Griffins or the Johnny Carsons put on guests like Zsa Zsa Gabor and Buddy Hackett, Cavett is likely to capture such provocative types as Katharine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles...
...Cavett as bright as he seems? A serious man in an unserious business? This book sets out to prove that he is. It is cast in the semispecious form of a talk show with Cavett the guest. His host-interlocutor is Christopher Porterfield, who was once Cavett's roommate at Yale and now acts as executive producer for Cavett's production company...
Porterfield is a critic and an experienced journalist (until this year he was a senior editor of TIME). His questions are thoughtful, if overlong, and the literary format works reasonably well. It allows Cavett to describe with amiable condescension his boyhood in Nebraska (his parents were both teachers), and his high school traumas (he was the shortest boy in any assembly). He was also the brightest and most competitive (he was twice a Nebraska state champion in gymnastics, a sport in which his 5 ft. 6 in. height was no handicap...
...classmates were dazzled by his ability to make instant anagrams out of any name that was mentioned ("Alec Guinness" became "genuine class"). Along with French and German, he acquired a great many cultural tag lines and thriftily squirreled them away in the back of his mind for future use. Cavett is certainly the only comedian extant who could say, "Where did we get this obsession that exegesis saves? God forgive that pun." Cavett was of course show biz obsessed. He met Carrie Nye McGeoy, his future wife, while acting in a New Haven amateur production. After graduation he hung around...
...book at tunes has the stilted air of This Is Your Life, it is still top entertainment for the reader, with scarcely a dull minute and only a minimum of station breaks (i.e., plugs for Cavett). Cavett is no one-shot, gag-Line comedian but a man whose turn of mind brings intelligence and humor to bear on childhood memories and adolescent contretemps (mostly sexual), and produces marvelously generous yet accurate assessments of his rivals (Carson, Paar, et al.) and acknowledged betters (Groucho Marx and Woody Allen). May the book's Nielsen rating be higher than Cavett...