Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Many a managing editor worries more about his comic strips than his front page. Last week Philadelphia Bulletin Managing Editor Walter Lister gave the editors more to worry about. Said he: "Comics, once regarded as a specific for all circulation ills, are now the sick chicks of the newspaper business." The measure of a strip has long been 50% readership for a good comic, up to 80% for the best., e.g., Dick Tracy, Li'l Abner. But a recent survey in one major U.S. city showed that of 40 strips published, only 13 have 50% readership...
...reason, says Lister, is television, which has lured readers away from the newspapers' back pages. For example, in Dothan, Ala., which has no television reception, comic-strip readership is 68%; in Anniston, Ala., which can tune in on six TV stations, readership is down...
...failures that prove more rewarding to read than a whole litter of lesser writers' tidy but empty triumphs. Austere and philosophical, it sometimes seems all head and no tale. Despite its dire point of view, the book jests and jostles with life, and really belongs with the sardonic comic charades of Swift, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and Ben Jonson's Volpone. Like them, it is a kind of cosmic hangover suffered by a man who-having drunk overfull of the human race-swears off mankind. Melville's nausea ran so deep that...
This diversity of comic elements, in the hands of other playwrights, could certainly lead to chaos. Indeed, even Teichmann and Kaufman have over-reached themselves in the girdle episode, which, besides being irrelevant, is largely unfunny. But on the whole, Cadillac's material stays admirably cohesive. The authors may be using a shotgun instead of a rifle, but their target is the large one of sustained humor rather than the pin-point of specific ridicule. And the laughs are constant all evening...
...acting, like the plot, is distinguished by competent humor in all directions. Loring Smith, as the ex-business tycoon ("I don't get ulcers; I give 'em!") whose life in the Pentagon is made miserable by "the damned ole Senate, epitomizes this comic versatility. He delivers everything from vaudeville gags to a farcical high school oration, and is so unabashed a comedian that he laughts at his own material. The audience does too, of course. Ruth McDevitt plays Mrs. Laura Partridge, the ex-actress who attends a stock-holders meeting on the advice of her horoscope and ends up controlling...