Word: comic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...detailed as murals. Within one huge blue and rose G, an artist had drawn St. Francis kneeling to receive the stigmata (see cut). Gradually the illustrations were separated from the text, and sometimes they almost supplanted it-so that bumpkin barons and illiterate lords could "read" their books like comic strips. They had no trouble identifying each character; the beasts were beastly, the saints saintly, and the maidens maidenly...
...musical gleams with the gilt-edged Porter signet. The author of You're the Top-which inspired a sort of national cult of memorizers and parodists in 1934-always turns out lyrics that are distinctly his own. They brim with stylish grace and colloquial impudence, real comic invention, multisyllabic rhymes, innuendoes about I'amour, digs at social foibles, and easy allusions to famous people and far-off places...
...Kiss Me, Kate, Porter's score blends several styles to harmonize with a play-within-a-play about a production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. He has ranged from comic ditties and Broadway torch ballads to songs in the rich, tuneful manner of Italian light opera, to match the Paduan setting of The Shrew. Several take their titles, and the flavor of their lyrical development, from the play's Elizabethan verse. The New York Times's Brooks Atkinson solemnly declared that I Hate Men is "the perfect musical sublimation of Shakespeare...
Married. Keenan Wynn, 32, cinema comic, son of stage and radio comic Ed Wynn; and Betty Jane Butler, 25, blonde Hollywood model; he for the second time (his first wife is now married to his best friend, Van Johnson); in Tijuana, Mexico...
Died. Willie Howard (real name: William Levkowitz), 62, wizened, mop-haired stage comic who convulsed theatergoers for half a century with his low-comedy antics (best known routine: his characterization of Professor Pierre Ginsberg, a French language teacher); of a liver ailment; in Manhattan. The son of a cantor, Vaudevillian Howard made his debut at twelve as a boy soprano, scored his big hits teamed with older brother Eugene in the Shuberts' Winter Garden revues and George White's Scandals...