Word: farceurs
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Preparing for his 70th birthday, Master Farceur Noel Coward made it clear that one of the blithest spirits of the age is still blithe. Defending his lack of an Oxbridge education to London newsmen, he said: "It is of little help at the first rehearsal to be able to translate Cicero." What of T. S. Eliot's complaint that Coward had never spent an hour in the study of ethics? "I do not think it would have helped me," said he. Had he ever tried to enlighten his audience instead of just amusing them? "I have a slight reforming...
...Charles Walters shuffles words, pranks and players in and around greater Tokyo with a perfectly relaxed air. Hutton, a quizzical comic talent packed into a skyscraper frame, hilariously displays a pained embarrassment over his skill as a wiggly-hipped 30-mile walker, and he passes the test as a farceur by keeping pace with Grant. Samantha nips through her first comedy role with such unexpected verve that she will probably be asked to impersonate plucky, romantic dream girls for years to come. Confronted by an office pal while a couple of drowsy strangers storm her bathroom one morning, she dryly...
Best at Conversation. Pain seemed foreign to Jean Cocteau because it was in such bad taste. In the sweep of French life and letters, he was the incomparably protean, mercurial, acrobatic, magical virtuoso-"a one-man band," as he called himself. He was the eternal dilettante-novelist, poet, farceur, essayist, film maker, actor, painter, sculptor, choreographer, composer, actor-and above all, talker. "Nothing he has written," said one of his friendly critics, "is worth half an hour of his conversation." He despised the limitations of professionalism. "The only way to make a good film is to know nothing about film...
...back at least to Herod, the slayer of children and aspiring Christ killer in disguise ('and when you have found him, bring me word, that I may also come and worship him'); to Judas, the original businessman with the contract in the pocket; and to the anonymous vulgar Jewish farceur who, in answer to Christ's 'Eli', eh' forced a reed filled with vinegar between His lips." The twin masks of the Jew-mutilator and usurer thus had Biblical sanction "at a time when literature flourished under clerical auspices and when nine tenths of the corpus poeticum derived from Biblical...
Somewhere in this studied confusion of old stuff and nonsense lurks a workable idea for farce, as longtime Farceur Norman (Dear Ruth) Krasna should know. All it lacks is taste, timing, funny lines and, mostly, a pair of at least likable romantic leads...