Word: comic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Americans like comic strips, but some hate them. One who hates them belligerently is Author-Critic John Mason Brown. Last week during a radio debate in Manhattan's Town Hall on what's wrong with the funnies, he collided with boisterous Cartoonist Al Capp (real name: Alfred Gerald Caplin...
Critic Brown admitted "that as a part of every healthy diet, everyone needs a certain amount of trash. . . . The comic books, however . . . [are] the lowest, most despicable, most harmful and unethical form of trash. . . As a people we must grow up. . . . We must put behind us that fear of the best and that passion for the mediocre which most Americans cultivate. Comics are the marijuana of the nursery . . . the bane of the bassinet...
Thin Distinction. "The Council's action," said Austin, "[must be] directed to keeping the peace and not to enforcing partition." The thin distinction would be easier to make in the Council chamber than in the embattled Holy Land. The comic effort to make it, however, followed logically from past U.S. efforts to please everyone, which had ended by pleasing no one. Zionists were crying traitor at the U.S. The U.S. position in the strategically important Arab world was hurt in ways that might cost years and possibly blood to repair...
Almost perfunctorily, Boss Flynn picked a middle-aged lawyer named Karl Propper, who looks a little like Movie Comic Hugh Herbert. Democratic chieftains, watching the A.L.P. splinter over the Wallace third-party candidacy, figured Propper as a shoo-in. Republicans merely went through the motions: they nominated an unknown building contractor and the G.O.P. boss left town for a Florida vacation...
...style perfected in the old Mack Sennett and Chaplin comedies. The story: a slap-happy cross-country French tour, complicated by saboteurs, stolen crown jewels, and burlesqued pursuers. The picture has an air of reckless and generally happy improvisation. It fails to develop and pay off its comic points brilliantly enough, but it is thoroughly enjoyable...