Word: gag
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Whether they ogled da goils, hersted da flag or simply berled in the noonday sun, they absolutely moidered the King's English. The "vulgar speech" that H.L. Mencken denounced in The American Language was long the despair of philologists, as well as a rich source of argot and gag lines for stand-up comics. But now Brooklynese seems to have just about gone the way of dem Bums, as the old Brooklyn Dodgers were known...
Dick Cavett is the darling of people who say proudly that they never watch television. His wit is quick and responsive-it avoids the soggy, set-piece gag and flashes in reaction to what the guest has just said. When Norman Mailer once proclaimed that he was smarter than the other guests, Cavett briskly offered him another chair to contain his giant intellect. While the Jack Paars or the Merv Griffins or the Johnny Carsons put on guests like Zsa Zsa Gabor and Buddy Hackett, Cavett is likely to capture such provocative types as Katharine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles...
...book at tunes has the stilted air of This Is Your Life, it is still top entertainment for the reader, with scarcely a dull minute and only a minimum of station breaks (i.e., plugs for Cavett). Cavett is no one-shot, gag-Line comedian but a man whose turn of mind brings intelligence and humor to bear on childhood memories and adolescent contretemps (mostly sexual), and produces marvelously generous yet accurate assessments of his rivals (Carson, Paar, et al.) and acknowledged betters (Groucho Marx and Woody Allen). May the book's Nielsen rating be higher than Cavett...
...Kanfer, now anchor man of TIME'S Essay section, "and the coins would generally clatter to the floor, to my embarrassment. As a magician, I had ten things working against me-my fingers." So the young Kanfer went to New York University and ended up writing advertising copy, gag lines for Victor Borge, short fiction, TV programs, a few off-Broadway shows. In 1966 he joined TIME as a writer for the Show Business section before turning movie critic and essayist. This week he was back at his old haunt for our story on the renaissance of magic. Over...
...five crazy guys" who arranged this record are wags, activists, and any picky Harvard lame-brain who's worth his salt will go batty hunting puns. More than any other Firesign Theatre album, the Rat bristles like a hedgehog with mixed metaphors, malapropisms, and plays on words. Its running gag on cocaine is especially amusing. In short, The Giant Rat is diverting, if facile...