Word: gag
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Proposition--clearly modeled after the now-famed Chicago improvisational troupes -- strenuously avoids stooping for the easy, gag-line laughs. Trying to create original situational humor, the production occasionally sacrifices a quick laugh in pursuit of something deeper, but that's the course an improvisational group must follow to be more than a cut-rate Neil Simon show. When the sought-after originality breeds laughs, then you've got a winner, and The Proposition wins more than it loses...
...comedian," Fred Allen said, "is a man on the treadmill to oblivion." But it is the gag writer who makes him go, and in the specialized craft of making funny men seem funny, few people have larger reputations than Mel Brooks...
...jolly them along, American's "Super Pro," which is offering 250 Mustangs to the first 250 who can fill five blank spaces with the pictures of professional football stars, produced on TV in person the hardest of all the stars to find, Detroit Lions' Wayne Walker. The gag brought nothing but hollow laughter from the thousands of Super Pro players still lacking the Walker stamp...
They still complement each other neatly, but the interplay between them lacks the subtle Laurel and Hardy mix of hostility and mutual dependence, not to mention their patient skill at milking a gag. And so Smashing Time ends up as little more than a lot of pratfalling and pie-throwing...
Much later, during the Truman Administration, Bob told his radio audience: "I loved the April Fools' gag a fellow pulled in Washington. He walked into the White House and said he was from Missouri, and before he could holler 'April fool!' he was a Cabinet member." By that time, Hope and his sidekicks-popeyed, siren-throated Jerry Colonna, Brenda and Cobina, and Bandleader Skinnay Ennis-had turned Tuesday into Bob Hope night in the U.S. Every Wednesday morning in those days, the Dow-Jones stock ticker used to carry the best of his jokes. During...