Word: comical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Nero who, in his ventures as an actor, packed his houses with as many as 5,000 soldiers under strict orders to appreciate him. The French refined it with the institution of the claque, with such specialists as rieurs* or laughers. In the heyday of U.S. radio, comics often helped a laugh along by kicking the announcer or pummeling the guest star to get studio audiences laughing at what unseeing hearers could only assume was the comic's wit. But it remained for TV to forge mirth with disembodied electronic efficiency...
Comedians traditionally harbor an urge to play Hamlet; in television, a newer tradition has it, they play him offscreen all the time. In Robert Alan Aurthur's Tale. of the Comet, Studio One offered a case history of the TV comic as a tragic hero-a lonely figure tortured by self-defeating uncertainty amid the debris of his fallen ratings. Tim Tully is a onetime top banana who trampled 19 writers in three seasons in his frenzy to stop slipping. As the play opens, he is on the eve of an attempted comeback that seems doomed by his panicky...
...Geordie. A stiff comic punch delivered by the British-an intoxicating mixture of Scotch and wry; with Bill Travers, Alastair Sim (TIME...
...clearly underlines the newsman's disgust at the facts he uncovers. The supporting cast is also excellent, without any exception. Keenan Wynn gives a particularly fine performance as a sardonic and unprincipled executive, and former television comedian Ed Wynn presents something of a small acting gem as the faintly comic radio station owner who gave Fuller his start in the business. But everybody who worked on The Great Man deserves some compliments for their taste and restraint. They have put together a very good little picture. --THOMAS K. SCHWABACHER
...higher Soviet bureaucracy: by a paradox, the egalitarian theory of Communism has produced a pathologically heightened sense of status-so that life in the embassy went on by rules something like the pecking hierarchy observed by barnyard fowl. Mrs. Petrov got into hot water for having put a comic picture within eyeshot of Stalin's portrait, and even hotter water when she was falsely accused of having thrown a pie at the ambassador's wife...