Word: gag
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...honor. The bite would be $1 per mention, plus $1 for each flattering adjective. Titles of nobility would be taxed $100, and photographs $10 per column inch. For collecting the tax, the newspapers would be allowed to keep 25% of the take. Going along with the gag, Prensa Libre used up seven adjectives in describing Minister Lopez Fresquet (who is in the Havana Social Register) as a great economist and intellectual, and then noted: "Comrade Rufo now owes...
Guido & Grower. The gag had an unlikely beginning. It was born in Toots Shor's Manhattan saloon one afternoon in 1956, when Pat and a pal, Lynn Phillips, were relaxing from their jobs as time salesmen for NBCTV. They were already practiced hands at the dialect spoof. Pat had picked up a talent for mimicry from his father, a successful nightclub comic of the '30s, and he and his friend used their skill as a "sales adjunct" when they wanted to warm up prospects with a laugh or two. That afternoon in Shor's, the Andrea Doria...
...gag was such a success that they moved it to another bar, were soon arguing with some Italian waiters that if Guido and other seamen jumped into the lifeboats first, they were not cowards, because it was their duty to protect those expensive little boats with the motors in them. Later, their lines more polished. Pat and pals turned Guido into a golf pro. introduced him to Singer Dick Haymes, who suggested that he had once played Guide's home course in Salerno. (There is no golf course in Salerno though Pat plays high-grade three-handicap golf...
...gag was still going strong back in Shor's one winter afternoon of 1958. This time it drew a delighted audience in Funnyman Jonathan Winters (TIME, Oct. 13), who was scrabbling about in unquiet desperation, trying to scare up some good acts for his stint as host on the Paar show. He invited Harrington...
...best parts of the film, however, do not come under the sight gag category. Then, as now, parody was one of the movies' strongest sources of comedy, whether it was Will Rogers playing Robin Hood, or Ben Turpin as the latin lover. The best visual humor, only fleetingly dealt with here, was really the "dictionary of facial expressions" which could turn answering the telephone into a momentous occasion...