Word: comicalities
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this week's show, Walter Huston, from Hollywood, wrestled through Stephen Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster; eagle-beaked Comic Jimmy Durante paid off with: "T'ank yuh, Boigess. May I call yuh Meredit'?" Much of the continuity was contributed by the U. S.'s No. 1 literary jack-in-the-box, William Saroyan. Volunteer Saroyan mailed in the last of his manuscript Friday night, forgetting Saturday was Armistice Day, a mail holiday. When Sunday came, and no Saroyan, CBS chased him down, had him re-conjure the missing paragraphs...
...best indication that Rumanians, as well as their King, are convinced that the times are now too serious for comic opera, is the type of able younger men who have stepped into the Government. Most notable of these is Foreign Minister Gafencu, a World War I aviator with an intelligent and good-looking wife and the third largest paper in Bucharest (The Times...
...home, Weeping Willie had not been sacked, but he had a back seat while BBC took off its kid gloves, permitted anti-German cracks, digs at British home policy. Comic Tommy Handley twitted censorship with references to the Office of Twerps, the Ministry of Irritation, was a scream lampooning Hitler, whose mustache he once compared to a splash from a passing taxi. Most telling BBC Hitler-baiter : Band Waggon's little Arthur Askey, cooking up ingenious schemes for pestering a certain Mr. Nasty. Sample: Plotting to train 5,000 parrots to fly over old Nasty's House...
...rimmed Merlyn's help, to defeat rebellious kings; how to enlist Might in the cause of Right. Half-fantasy, half-burlesque, like its predecessor it mixes wisecracks and Morte d'Arthur, scrambles legend and topical satire. While her husband King Lot is away fighting Arthur, Queen Morgause, comic symbol of the egocentric wife, attempts the seduction of lovesick King Pellinore (3.2 Don Quixote) and Sir Grummore Grummursum (Sancho Panza on rye). Meanwhile her neglected sons Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris and Gareth confound their Saracen tutor Palomides, who talks rather like Charlie Chan, and beg stories from heretic St. Torealvac...
...White's well-timed, wild dialogues are suggestive of the better (not the best) comic strips. His Freudian overtones and contemporary analogies make the book "profound," in the publisher's opinion, as well as "funny." There is an ice carnival, a burlesque of chivalry complete with pratt falls; there is an affecting and terrible sequence, in somewhat doubtful taste, about a unicorn. The book as a whole might be described as a shake-up of British rectory humor, Evelyn Waugh, Laurel & Hardy, John Erskine, and the Marquis de Sade, quite well enough blended to please the palate...