Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...satirize Dirty Harry-type heroes. CBS's Designing Women features a quartet of single friends in Atlanta who run a decorating business together, a sort of pre-mid-life Golden Girls. The show has a good cast (including Annie Potts and Dixie Carter) but an overload of formula gag writing ("Suzanne, if sex were fast food, there'd be an arch over your...
...probably no coincidence that Our House, the season's best family show, is the one that is not a half-hour sitcom. The form may simply have grown too fast paced and hyped with gag lines to accommodate the subtleties of relatives living under one roof. In a scene from Our House, Brimley is concerned about his grandson, who has been sulking because his moneymaking project of painting neighborhood curbs is being threatened by a pair of bullies. Brimley walks into the boy's room and finds him brooding alone. Instead of launching into a typical TV heart-to-heart...
...consensus at the symposium: self-deprecating humor is a President's best friend and weapon. "The chance to be seen as a warm, relaxed human being with a twinkle-in-the-eye approach to himself is just too good an opportunity to miss," said Bob Orben, a leading gag writer and author of many of Ford's best lines. "Humor reaches out, puts a warm, affectionate arm around an audience and says, 'I am one of you. I understand you.' If you can laugh together, you can vote together...
Ginn was selling props -- magic wands that turn into rubber snakes, and whatnot -- and he punctuated his pitch Henny Youngman-style: "Talk about a cheap gag. This'll make you gag, Charlie." Then Bill Anderson came out to talk about using ventriloquism in church work. He had written a pamphlet of 111 different ways to use it, one paragraph devoted to each method, and he mentioned all 111. A sample: "Use your dummy for free advertising. Take your dummy to a clothing store to get a new suit, or a barber shop to get his hair cut, and call...
...last year he decided that humor was a great presidential virtue that needed more study. So he scheduled a serious (sort of) symposium at his museum titled "Humor and the Presidency," then began badgering comics, cartoonists, gag writers and anybody else who had laughed with him--or at him. Ford's pitch: You guys made your living...