Word: cleverer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...David signature: a souped-up piano, an unseen chorus blowing like the wind over solos and ensemble numbers alike, tunes that demand alternately a whisper and a belt, and lyrics that stick so close to life in its physical and emotional details as to leave no room either for clever allusions or technical bravado. The long and the short of it is that they're new (at least in the romantic world of Broadway success stories where writing the finest popular songs of the day counts for nothing), they're different, and they're here...
...Lampoon, in fact, spoils its best effort in the issue with more of this overkill. The last page of Life, as you may or may not know, is entitled "Miscellany" and consists of a captioned photograph, usually of some cuddly animal in some clever pose. The Lampoon parodied it nicely--offering an anguished little girl, left hand over her eyes, right hand holding a gun pointing down at a dead white cat which lies in the street in its own blood. The whole is entitled "No Hard Felines." But, almost as if the Poonies felt this was too subtle...
...this glass-and-concrete palace is a Jewish real estate mogul named Arthur Goldman (Pleasence). Goldman has a jigsaw-puzzle personality. He wants only a "kosher" staff around him, yet he indulges in acridly anti-Semitic remarks. With bewildering rapidity, his accented spray of words veers from the clever to the vulgar to the mad. In a sense, Goldman is the kind of Angst-ridden creature a very bright student might have constructed after making a close study of how Harold Pinter fashions his characters. Since Shaw acted the mentally disturbed older brother in Pinter's The Caretaker...
Even school boards thought up clever ploys. In Greene County, the school board told Negro residents of Tishabee that their children could attend either the Greene County High School (white) or the Greene County Training School (black). However, both schools were 20 miles from Tishabee, and the school board said that it was sorry, but it could only provide busses to the Training School...
...about the machinery. Those who take their funhouses seriously may grow confused and exasperated. But readers of The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy are familiar with Barth's impulses toward farce, his intellectual mobility, shaggy doggerel and merry nihilism. These people are apt to accept the clever gimmickry as one would a party favor...