Word: duller
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...this point the council will become considerably duller, with the semester's political climax over and only the more perfunctory business of governing remaining. First-years will note that the upperclass students who so eagerly wanted to ease their arduous transitions from non-U.C. member to U.C. member are no longer stopping by their rooms, now that their elections for executive board member are over...
...Johnny made jokes about Vietnam, Watergate, errant Senators or TV evangelists, he enabled the audience to laugh the problem away. "Nobody can figure out Johnny's politics," Leno says. "The joke comes first." The trouble is that Carson's monologues have stayed hip, while his studio audiences have grown duller, less attuned to the issues he makes fun of. The star now gets his biggest cheers when he walks onstage; the crowd has come not for comedy but for celebrity spectacle. Carson makes a state visit, and the audience responds like tourists at Buckingham Palace...
...there a duller or more formula-ridden artist in America than Salle in 1991, as he approaches the Big Four-Oh? His work, essentially, is a decoction from three other artists. From Robert Rauschenberg's combines of the '50s and his silk-screen "collages" of the early '60s, Salle learned about piling unrelated images onto a canvas, the difference being that Salle hasn't a trace of the lyrical sharpness and poetic force of vintage Rauschenberg. His tone is a supercilious droning, very far from Rauschenberg's enthused, life-enhancing Barbaric Yawp...
...comprehensible: the plagiarist could not resist. But what if the borrowed stuff is a flat, lifeless mess -- the road kill of passing ideas? In that case there is less risk, but surely no joy at all. (Does the plagiarist ever feel joy?) Safer to steal the duller stones. None but the dreariest specialists will remember them or sift for them in the muck...
...many inside and outside the Post, Downie's avowed attempt to make the paper more credible and authoritative has also made it duller and more predictable, less willing to take on the powerful and needle the pretentious. "There was a time at the Post when its creative talents were pushed to move forward," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "That time has passed." Concedes Bradlee: "We're less concerned with taking risks now that we're successful and 25 years older. There's a certain conservatism that...