Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...zest. Too often they display the outworn grotesqueries of Carmen Miranda and the excessive juvenility of Actress Powell. Occasionally, to denote conscious hamming by members of the heroine's acting fam ily, the soundtrack breaks into a few pompous bars of Wagner. It is not much of a gag, but it is a handy guide to the intentions of the players...
...such a shopworn framework. You know perfectly well what will happen when the family buys a dog that Gilbreth disapproves of, and what the cute little remarks are going to be when mother has her twelfth baby. You can easily sense each time the "cheaper by the dozen" gag is coming up. Only Gilbreth's time studies redeem the movie from being completely hackneyed, and they aren't enough to make it really amusing. "Cheaper by the Dozen" is just a quantitative variation on the "Life with Father" theme...
...Lenin as saying that the "best way to communize any country is to socialize its medical profession," and then implied that Pepper was a Leninist for supporting the Administration's national health-insurance bill. Smathers' supporters carried dislike of their opponent to the dining table, where the gag was to say "Please pass the black salt...
...that there is to be a wedding in the house, for now, after 87 years, a pair of dead lovers can be married, too. The weddings are interrupted by murder, which turns the second half of the evening into a whodunit. The whole evening is tethered to a gag which makes ghosts visible only to virgins...
...advertisers, who generally get blamed for low entertainment standards, seemed more worried than the TV executives about program quality. Said Kraft Foods' Advertising Manager John McLaughlin: "I have heard [TV] defined as movies twelve years old for an audience twelve years old . . . That is not a funny gag and we know it is not a fair definition of television. It is our job to see that it never becomes an accurate...