Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Show business is the common-and uncommonly interesting-denominator of the immortal and the merely diverting, the sublime and the corny, the Greek amphitheater and the burlesque runway. It includes Bernard Shaw and the TV gag writer, Laurence Olivier and the Las Vegas chorus girl -as well as their audiences. TIME'S new section will report "Show Biz" in all its phases. It will include news, trends and personalities of movies, theater, television, nightclubs, pop music. It will report on the more offbeat corners such as carnivals and beauty contests. And it will cover the vast supporting cast...
...mother and Billy Graham think he should have been a minister. He himself thinks perhaps he should have tried to be a missionary, like Albert Schweitzer. Some of television's unseen but much-heard word merchants think he would have made a fine gag writer. Walter Winchell plainly thinks he should have been put into an ablative nose cone on a one-way rocket trip to the moon. Sponsors of late movies think he should have stayed in daytime television, and all across the land, people who like to go to sleep early think he should have stood...
After a while, even M. Charles begins to gag on life Chez Pavan, offers his own desperate diagnosis: "Perhaps I should go to an alienist...
...horned" creature "acomin' out of the sky" to "get a job in a rock-'n'-roll band." Oklahoma-born Singer Wooley, 37, who has written hits such as Too Young to Tango and appeared in westerns (High Noon) as a badman, got his inspiration from a gag riddle posed by the child of a friend: "What has one eye, one horn, flies and eats people?" (Answer: a one-eyed, one-horned, flying people eater.) Wooley composed the song in an hour, hyped the People Eater's voice in currently approved fashion; he achieved the toy saxophone...
...transcendentalist, Thoreau saw spirit at the heart of matter. But he was never so genteel as to gag at reality. "Let a man reserve a good appetite for his peck of dirt," he wrote, "and expect his chief wealth in unwashed diamonds." At 23, Thoreau was already grappling with the central dilemma of his life, how to know himself and be himself under the raised eyebrow of conformist society: "It is always easy to infringe the law-but the Bedouins of the desert find it impossible to resist public opinion...