Word: gag
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Ross had offered his last crumb of inconsequential news and the gag had been played to death, Reporter Truman talked a while on behalf of the President of the U.S. "I think this is the best vacation I have had down here," he said. "I think the family enjoyed it too." Margaret and Bess had flown to Washington at midweek, a prompt signal for Adviser Clark Clifford to cheat on shaving. The President himself was due to leave for Washington Dec. 20 and to take off three days later for Christmas with the family in Independence...
York on their TV set. The plotless show consisted entirely of Goodman's and Jane's comments on the film, of her misinterpretations of the obvious and his exasperated efforts to set her straight. In a typical gag, Ace says, wonderingly: "Imagine the Indians selling Manhattan for $24! And where are the Indians today!" Jane: "Playing baseball for Cleveland." Future shows will have only such subsidiary characters as an eight-year-old all-white West Highland terrier named Blackie and Ace's complaining, cliché-ridden mother-in-law (played by Betty Garde...
...effect of all this suggested a dangerous possibility: smog would soon be so valuable to the publicity men, radio gag writers and others who now make their living off jokes about Los Angeles' dry river bed and rare snowstorms, that support of antismog ordinances would be regarded as proof of disloyalty to the local way of life. After that it would be only a question of time before Los Angeles began boasting "Bigger Smogs than Pittsburgh" and movie stars took to wearing miners' lamps instead of dark glasses and sunshine was apologetically dismissed as "unusual weather...
Suggesting a left-handed biography of Berle himself, the story catalogues the rise to television fame of a comic who specializes in gag-stealing and belligerent self-interest, and stops at nothing to keep an audience laughing. The movie includes an endless parade of vaudeville turns with Berle running through his television repertory, throwing in some slapdash imitations of Ted Lewis, Al Jolson, Bert Lahr, et al. Though most of the skits are single-set affairs shot by a rigid camera, there is nothing static about the movie. Berle's heavy cavortings energize the screen like a buffalo stampede...
...French Chamber of Deputies decades ago and which eventually found its way into the anecdote section of the "Readers Digest," is typical of those in the movie. Almost all of the laughs arrive by way of deep left field and are put across with the heavy hand of amateur gag men. This is unfortunate because four of the participants are capable of real humor. Besides the traditional Hepburn-Tracy team, the movie present Judy Holliday of "Born Yesterday" fame and Tom Ewell, who played Ensign Pulver in "Mr. Roberts...