Word: cleverer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ramparts began publishing in Menlo Park, Calif., which was, as Hinckle puts it, "a ridiculous place to publish a magazine." So it moved to one of those topless streets in San Francisco's New Left Bohemia. The staffers fill the magazine with clever if sophomoric humor. Public figures distasteful to Ramparts are pictured as various beasts of prey. The latest, Columnist Max Lerner, is shown as a "Common Boar" who would rather be "fed than...
...clever man in the usual sense. He was certainly no intellectual and read little but the Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest and a western or two. He was not imaginative, and perhaps this was just as well; unlike his friend George Patton, he never developed fantasies of being a reincarnation of one of Alexander the Great's captains. Nor could he speak, as Douglas MacArthur could, like Henry V before Harfleur. Yet the conclusion is inevitable that the war was too serious to be left to anyone but this general...
However, Tom LaFarge's articles are clever and sometimes touching. He has an eye for the incisive detail that can paint an instant picture--a "jade-rimmed pince-nez," an "ivory ping-pong table" -- but sometimes he starts cataloguing trivia. With sparser details and stronger endings, his stories will be gems. Conn Nugent's revelation that Harvard football victories depress the economy is off-beat and has an angle--the sort of amusing fact-twisting that the Yale Record is more inclined to do, but very welcome in the Lampoon...
...acting is completely gimmicky, but with fast and clever gimmicks. Chumley has mastered an idiot grin, and cartwheels admirably across the stage. Miss Bush and her counterpart Dame Chat (Joan Tolentino) scream too much, but their grimaces and multicolor petticoats (Lewis Smith's costuming is superb) more than compensate. In smaller parts, David Dunton as a myopic curate is the only actor to read, rather than chant his lines, and his care pays off in laughs. Ed Jay, Jr., as a sleepy Linus-figure with a patchwork blanket, is trapped in his one sight gag, but is pleasant enough...
...through the excruciating ordeal of the impromptu question-answer period. Well, the press and public don't ask very intelligent questions these days, so the results were limited at best. We learned, for instance, that Agnes Varda, directress of "Le Bonheur" and "Les Creatures," is a very clever woman with a wicked sense of humor, but we hardly learned whether Agnes Varda has anything to say about film-making...