Word: cavett
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...Jean-Paul Sartre didn't say that, and it certainly wasn't Spiro T. Agnew. It was Dick Cavett. There is something curious about a $15,000-a-week entertainer who is afflicted with Weltschmerz instead of narcissism. Gloomily, he keeps wondering how it has come to pass that he is a big TV star? What's he doing there anyway...
...actor-writer-comic; yet he works best as a ringmaster of conversation heightened by the prodding of an acute mind?free associating, Perelmanesque, almost surrealistic. He does battle five times a week with Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, which claims an audience more than twice the size of Cavett's (7.7 million viewers v. 3.4 million...
...format that has become tiresomely predictable in the hands of others, Dick Cavett at 34 has produced the best mixture of literate repartee, information, entertainment and urbane wit to be found on late-night television. Those who dig good-natured buffoonery and the chitchat of West Coast showfolk go for Competitor Merv Griffin. Viewers who want to see briskly organized quasi-journalistic interviews watch David Frost's excellent syndicated talk show, a two-time Emmy Award winner. Those who tune in Carson do so mainly to watch a consummate comedian scoring off guests who might as well be dummies...
...Dick Cavett Show gets its share of dummies too; the entire talk-show circuit on radio and TV is overloaded with people who are plugging their books, plays, movies, recordings and, if nothing else, their egos. But for the most part, Cavett's guests are intelligent, entertaining and at times controversial. Sir Noel Coward and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne once treated Cavett's audience to an evocative and amusing evening. On a two-week series taped in London, Cavett produced an extraordinary constellation of British humorists, theater people and politicians. Fred Astaire, Jack Benny and Robert Mitchum have each...
Whether dealing with Barzini on Mussolini or Orson Welles on films, Cavett lavishes upon his best guests a combination of warmth, informed intelligence and swift wit. His thought process is like a Grimes light on a patrol car, turning incessantly, flashing quips and telling comments on all manner of subject matter. When Joe Namath said that a nude scene in his latest movie had been done in very good taste, Cavett commented, "I'm sorry to hear that," then brightly switched to something more lighthearted: "Have you ever been offered a bribe?" He asked Actress Sally Kellerman...