Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...stock gag line of young comedians is that they would like to host a fund-raising telethon, but by the time they got into the business "all the diseases were taken." Not quite. There is still the financial anemia that attacks many U.S. institutions, including political parties. The Democrats, for example, are heading into the 1972 campaign carrying a debt of $9.3 million. In hopes of easing that burden, the party this weekend will stage the most ambitious telethon ever put on the screen...
...quit probably because his own seemed to give up when he was 14. Sometimes he dreams of assuming authority - or flouting it. In high school, Allen tried to become a featherweight boxer, and spent many an afternoon fleeing the truant officer. Out of experience came a typical self-deprecatory gag. "I wanted to be an FBI man," Woody will moan. "But you have to be five-foot-seven and have 20/20 vision. Then I toyed with becoming a master criminal-but you have to be five-foot-seven and have 20/20 vision...
Vulgar Parlance. The gag illustrates Allen's reliance on a comic device that is as old as Aristophanes-the principle of inversion or, in more vulgar parlance, the old switcheroo. Woody's divorce joke, in fact, is merely an updated version of a line used by Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. "If I ever get married," drawls Algernon, "I'll certainly try to forget the fact. . . Divorces are made in Heaven." For a time, Allen used so many switches that friends in the trade referred to him as Allen Woody. He carried a sword...
Good News, Bad News jokes* run the entire gamut of human experience and are often topical. In one current gag, for example, President Richard Nixon suddenly appears on all the television networks: "I have some good news for you tonight-and some bad news," he tells his audience. "The good news is that this week our planes have stopped bombing Hanoi. The bad news is that at this very moment they are on their way to Peking...
...ancient Washington gag is that an unsuccessful weapon is about to be renamed "the civil servant" because "it won't work and you can't fire it." That derisive opinion of federal employees may now have to be changed. For the past year a Government task force has been conducting the first survey ever made of output per man-hour by Uncle Sam's hirelings. Last week Labor Secretary James Hodgson announced that the results were "a pleasant surprise": the bureaucrats in Foggy Bottom and environs have been getting bigger productivity increases out of their workers than...