Word: comical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Wilson "used to like comic operas and good acting. Three times a week we'd go to the theater. Always, outside the theater, the crowds banked deep. All the Presidents like to see those crowds waiting. Somehow, all of them . . . know how the crowd feels toward them by the way the crowd acts. It's natural. Wouldn't you like to come out of a building and get cheered by maybe 50,000 people...
Tambo & Bones. After a ballad or two, the Interlocutor addressed the show's comic artists, who flanked the semicircle and were known as endmen. Because they originally played the tambourine and bones, the endmen were known respectively as Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones. Sample dialogue between the Interlocutor and Messrs. Tambo & Bones...
...remembers had a lyrically warm, intimate, unregimented spirit that was missing at the Music Hall. The blackface tradition, in one form or another, dates from the colonial days when whites first saw and imitated Negro entertainers. As early as 1769, during a Manhattan performance of Isaac Bickerstaff's comic opera The Padlock, an actor named Lewis Hallam got drunk on the stage in his role of a Negro slave and brought the house down. This eventually led to "the novel, grotesque, original and surpassingly melodious Ethiopian Band entitled the Virginia Minstrels...
...makes a good deal of her short, tense visit to the film. Claudette Colbert most successfully sidetracks her prettiness for the more urgent priority of suggesting an exhausted young woman in coveralls. Paulette Goddard is easy to like in the fattest role in the film. She has a comic warmth and bounce reminiscent of the late Jean Harlow..Even easier to like is 4F (but outwardly rugged) Sonny Tufts, whose stumbling hands and voice develop wrinkles in the comedy of inarticulate love-making which are likely to become official among female cinemaudiences...
With gags alone, no matter how expertly fired, no comic can hit even a gag-loving nation between the eyes. Gags are too brassy, fleeting, unvisual. The true clown or jester tops the gag man by being both a richly eccentric character and a vividly expressive type-Chaplin is The Little Man, Durante The Wild Man, Ed Wynn The Perfect Fool. Hope has no eccentric character; but by giving his gags dramatic value he made himself a type-the dumb wise guy, the quaking braggart, the lavish tightwad. But this type somehow dissolves into a far broader and more significant...