Word: dimwits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...virginity is the only way to save him. Larry Paulsen, who displays range as the clownish Touchstone in As You Like It and as Titus' loyal brother, brings off an even trickier feat in Measure: allowing a modern audience to enjoy as fully as Elizabethan groundlings must have the dimwit puns and malapropisms of the hapless constable Elbow...
...unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946, was a collection of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and 6,000 switches, and occupied the space of a two-car garage. Yet ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was, in retrospect, a dimwit. When it worked, it did so only for short bursts because its tubes kept burning out. Built to calculate artillery firing tables, the half-million dollar ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions or subtractions per second. Today almost any home computer, costing only a few hundred dollars, can outperform poor old ENIAC...
...even the best programs break the mold; they only burnish it. The shows that hunker down on the middle ground content themselves with switching standard characters and stories around, rearranging furniture in an old house that actually needs razing, not redecoration. Giving the stalwart Brian Dennehy a hunky dimwit (Michael Dudikoff) for a teen-age son and a young daughter (Kathy Maisnik) who is enjoying some success as a country-and-western singer does not make him measurably less like Archie Bunker, even if his brains are heavier and his social conscience a little lighter. In Star of the Family...
...precision-tooled comedic skills owe much, as Cavett points out, to certain illustrious forebears: Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Bob Hope-"and Oliver Hardy-that burn, that long look into the lens." Surely Jonathan Winters was the inspiration for such Carson characters as the garrulous Aunt Blabby, the right-wing dimwit Floyd R. Turbo, even the huckstering greaseball Art Fern. Carnac the Magnificent is Steve Allen's Answer Man in swami's drag, and the Mighty Carson Art Players are Fred Allen's Mighty Allen Art Players with unreliable props. Carson's borrowings are leavened with respect...
...coward not a fighter". Penn wants you to feel Danelo has become a fighter, yet his moment of triumph involves kicking a local dopey cup in the groin and then throwing up on him. Instead of learning from his experiences, or gaining social awareness, Danclo remains basically the dimwit we met a long, long two hours ago, pursuing whatever brunette happen to be with him (we never see how he meets them) and retaining true love--for no earthly for the psycho nympho weren't those days crazy? Wild kids social upheaval...