Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...FATHER'S HEAD TO THE FRONT DOOR. From then on W.R.'s Journal outplayed the World at its own scare-head-hunting game. It was the Hearst-Pulitzer tug-of-war over Richard Outcault's forlorn Yellow Kid that brought on the day of the colored comic strip, and gave "yellow journalism" its name...
...deflate his head as well as his hide. Whether such needling does him much good is a question. Lanza hungers for praise of his voice, and, though he gets plenty, from 500 fan letters a day and from the personal entourage of nine which he rules like a comic-opera Latin American dictator, he also supplies it himself. From idolizing Enrico Caruso as far back as his childhood, he has passed through the stages of imitating Caruso's style, impersonating him in the movies and, finally, patronizing him in interviews...
Lanza perked up after Silver arranged to get him out of the MPs and into Special Services as a singer. They became fast buddies and fellow performers. Then came a chance for an audition before Sergeant Peter Lind Hayes, the nightclub and TV comic, who was traveling through to recruit performers for an Army Air Force show, On the Beam. In spite of his rare protective talents as a chowhound and goldbrick, Lanza's throat was so raw with Texas dust that he could not sing. Silver, who was already selected for the show, devised a ruse...
...lost in a jazzed-up jangle of gags, violence, slapstick and sticky jukebox ballads. Only rarely, e.g., the scene where Alice (spoken by Kathy Beaumont) meets the hookah-smoking caterpillar (Richard Haydn), does the Disney idiom enrich the fun instead of slanting it down to the comic-strip level...
...with the facts to picture the children's tale as a virtual allegory of the author's difficulties. To point up a tenuous parallel, he not only rigs the prologue but also changes such characters as the King of Hearts and the White Rabbit, who becomes a comic villain...