Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...both prosecution and defense attorneys-ordered the press not to print most of what was revealed at a public preliminary hearing. His reason: Simants' right to a trial untainted by prejudicial publicity superseded the freedom of the press. Although that broad ban was trimmed somewhat on appeal, a gag remained in force until the trial began in December (Simants was convicted and sentenced...
...plot is enervating to recount, it is excruciating to sit through. The script is replete with rough-and-tumble frontier humor, Hollywood style, which means that the characters talk like unemployed gag writers trying to top each other over a delicatessen breakfast. Segal and Hawn, who are usually actors of charm and humor, here look as if they would like to be on the first stage out of town-or maybe even under...
...York Idea by Langdon Mitchell. Though this comedy of manners was first presented in 1906, it is by no means spavined with age. It is the genre itself that has disappeared. We have grown accustomed to situation comedy, sight-and-gag comedy and black comedy. But the last instance of a social comedy based on an assured upper class was probably Clare Boothe Luce's The Women, and that play is now 40 years old. Essentially, the New York idea is divorce and, slightly more scandalously, the notion that divorced couples can be amiable friends...
...contrast, a gag which works far better involves King Lear's obsession with popcorn. A supposedly dignified, elderly figure running around shouting "Pop, pop, Jiffy Pop," is ridiculous enough to be funny, and the Act II opener, "The Popcorn Ballet," which features men with silken flame neckties trying to pop female characters dressed as resistant kernels of corn, is one of the most excitingly choreographed and outrageous numbers in the show...
Simultaneous translation keeps the audience in the picture and, for a few minutes, the show has interesting promise. Very shortly, however, it becomes clear that Playwright Horovitz has only one sort of joke in mind-a set of variations on the old Tower of Babel gag -and that Director Edward Berkeley can think of only one way to play it -stridently...