Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Aisle (music by Jule Styne; lyrics and sketches by Betty Comden & Adolph Green; produced by Arthur Lesser) can smile gratefully at its stars, Bert Lahr and Dolores Gray. Lahr remains among the best of the oldtime funnymen, and there are virtually no new ones. He has a nice comic face, he can make nice comic faces. He has a showman's sixth sense; his antics have authority. Best of all, he can lose his head splendidly when all about him are stodgily keeping theirs. As Captain Universe, leading the Space Patrol in a piece of stupendous interplanetary science fiction...
...Steve Allen Show (Mon.-Fri., 12 noon) started six months ago; since then, listeners with an aversion for the usual determined chatter shows have found welcome relief in Allen's aimless, leisurely style. A comic of the Godfrey school that grew with TV, Allen tells few set jokes, prefers the kind of cracks that grow suddenly and spontaneously out of ordinary situations. For the first five minutes of his show, he simply sits and chews over whatever happens to be on his fast-moving mind. Then he wanders around, reads (and makes appropriate cracks at) his fan mail, eats...
Most of the lesser characters of this gloomy melodrama are skillfully played by members of the Brattle company. Albert Marre plays a director with effective, quiet irony. Robert Fletcher plays a composer who is a fine comic creation in the first scene and an intensely serious fellow in the tenth. This may be inconsistent, but Fletcher is enjoyable anyhow. Thayer David struts and declaims and is entirely amusing as a ham actor...
...comic scenes and parts that Lenormand has written seem to have crept into the play by mistake. His thesis, which is finally stated explicitly near the end, is that humans love life, and for that reason life kills them. This is an interesting and tenable idea. But in his attempt to prove its truth, he heaps one unbearable emotion on top of another. The bloody last scene (which happens to be the thirteenth) kills off the hero and heroine. M. Lenormand has reached the worst of his worst. There is nothing more to say. One last, unbearable emotion...
...zany comic team of Dean Martin, 34, and Jerry Lewis, 25, has worked hard to get ahead in its five-year career in nightclubs, radio & TV and movies (TIME, May 23, 1949). Last week, in a personal appearance at Manhattan's Paramount Theater, the boys worked harder than ever. They played to packed houses six times a day, seven times on Saturday, and followed almost every appearance with an extra three minutes of clowning at their dressing-room window overlooking 44th Street-a methodical bit of madness designed to lure overloyal fans out of the Paramount's seats...