Word: comic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...corn-tassel blonde, two brunettes, one redhead. They stalked back & forth across the stage in formal gowns, danced, sang and displayed in somber black bathing suits what used to win Miss America contests. Judging took so long that the master of ceremonies ran out of gags, took to reading comic strips aloud. Said Sergeant Silvagni's wife, a bathing-beauty expert: "I thought they'd be a bunch of dogs this time. But they're prettier than I expected. They're not made up too much, for a change. It's the Ingrid Bergman influence...
...benefits in two years. Probably the first entertainer to work with the armed forces, Hope has also been the most frequent. Using trains, cars, trucks, tanks, jeeps, Hope has played in virtually every U.S. camp, last fall hopped off with his USO team (Singer Frances Langford, Guitarist Tony Romano, Comic Jerry Colonna) to tour Alaska. When, at the last moment, it looked as if the tour would fall through, Hope wired Lieut. General Simon B. Buckner: WE SING, DANCE, TELL STORIES; HAVE TUXEDOS; WILL TRAVEL; CAN WE PLAY YOUR CIRCUIT? They played it straight through to tiny posts...
...British circuit was tougher, with Hope & Company (Comic Jack Pepper substituting for Jerry Colonna) "resting" from camp shows by bobbing up in hospitals, dropping in on ack-ack crews, sloshing across rainswept heaths to entertain soldiers on maneuvers. Hope's gags got around so fast he had to keep changing them, and he and Scriptwriter Hal Block ground out new ones in bumpy transit, or in hotel rooms long past midnight...
Died. William Wymark ("W.W.") Jacobs, 79, for almost 50 years a favorite British humorist; after long illness; in London. For his comic Dickensian tales of London dockside life, beaky, grey-thatched Jacobs drew on boyhood experiences as the son of a Wapping wharf manager. With Many Cargoes (1896) he freed himself from a post-office clerkship. But though he culled some 17 volumes in the same vein for his 1931 omnibus, Snug Harbour, his best-known short story was the macabre The Monkey...
...dammed-up swimming hole, clumps of bamboo, the mud banks of the Chialing River and the middle of the Chialing River itself. If it were not for the presence of the bloody, mangled corpses of Chinese coolies ... it would be a pleasure to describe this raid as a comic triumph of bad marksmanship and general stupidity...