Word: cavett
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There was one student at Yale who was even dumber than Cavett - a rich alumnus' son named Clarence. On a final exam, a multiple-choice question was posed...
...since Will Rogers first ambled onstage with his lariat, comedians have played the hick-in-the-big-city for big laughs and good money. From Herb Shriner to George Gobel to Andy Griffith, dozens have twirled the same line - and still left enough rope for their lineal descendant, Dick Cavett. In a Greenwich Village nightclub last week, Cavett, 29, recited the doleful tale of his country boyhood in Nebraska. The story, as he tells it, is comical enough, and perhaps just true enough to serve as his public autobiography...
Antimissionary. After he graduated from Yale ("What can you say about a school that has a song entitled For God, For Country and Yale and is unhappy about the order of the billing?"), Cavett tried to take New York by storm-and was immediately snowed. He dined at a restaurant that was noted for its German-Chinese cuisine-only to find that one hour later he was hungry for power. He attended a wedding at which the bride was pregnant-so the guests threw puffed rice...
...Yourselfer. Cavett began his New York career in 1959 as a TIME copy boy (a job about which, fortunately for all concerned, he has no jokes). Then he wrote comedy lines for Jack Paar, Groucho Marx, Jack E. Leonard and Jerry Lewis. Typical problem: how should Paar introduce a certain buxom movie star? Cavett's solution: "Here they are, Jayne Mansfield...
After four years as a supplier, Cavett decided to be a do-it-yourselfer. Now he earns $1,000 a week on his own. With his laconic style and boyish innocence, he ought to go far. "I'll be happy," he says, "if I can just stay out of Nebraska...