Word: comic
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Many people blame the faculty and trustees for the intellectual lethargy in our colleges. But how about the students themselves? Why is that the majority of college papers, which are entirely in the students' own hands, have pages filled with accounts of athletics, poor comic columns, and trite editorials that try so hard to be clever? Why is there so little mention of education, and intellectual discussions, why no word on things that go on outside the college walls...
...reciter of our forefathers ? the reciter magnificent ? the lady of the awe-inspring brow and grave yard contralto who tore The Raven to tatters on the slightest provocation, the cadaverous youth who was so comic delivering Farmer Corn-tassel at the County Fair ? these, with the hansom-cab-driver and the professor of penmanship who drew little birds with flowing scrolls in their beaks, are rapidly passing into oblivion. Alas...
Before us are two memorials to the vanished art. The Comic and Humorous Reciter, edited by Ernest Pertwee and published by Routledge, of London, and an American product, My Recitations, selected by Cora Urquhart Potter, published by Lippincott. Dipping into them revives odd memories ? lambrequins and dadoes ? gilded rolling-pins, dudes, croquet, the high-wheel bicycle, the game of Boston ? a departed...
...Comic and Humorous Reciter is catholic in its tastes ? specimens of both English and American humor are admitted. Mark Twain and Bret Harte are represented, Dan Leno, Artemus Ward, and through out, that prolific writer, Anon. Would you convulse your hearers with an eight-page humorous de scription of the Oxford-Cambridge boat race? Or titillate them instead with misadventures attending a journey in a Pullman Palace Car? Here you are ? a little memory and you can be funny in at least five dialects, all equally incredible...
...criticisms seem to be called for. The first is general. Although many of the line cuts, such as the unsigned comic heading for the contents on page 4, are cleverly executed, on the whole the drawings are amateurish, and some are conspicuously inadequate. The reviewer is plunged into gloom by the dismal title page which introduces him to the subject of scholarships (page 237), and the headings for pages 194 and 198 are clumsily drawn. Not that artistic talent is unusually lacking in the class of 1926, for on the whole the cuts in this book are at least...