Word: gagged
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...town fathers of Blanchard, La., have passed two ordinances that give new meaning to the phrase "gag order." One is designed to prohibit city employees from publicly criticizing elected officials. A second bars employees from talking to the press or writing articles without prior permission from city hall. Blanchard (pop. 1,128) enacted the laws after area newspapers quoted an assistant fire chiefs criticism of new aldermen. Violators of the ordinances face disciplinary action in addition to possible firing. Only those few in top elective jobs will be exempted from the ban. That includes Police Chief Ted Bostwick, who grumbles...
...home, fine. Carson will smile and bob his head and smooth his tie while the audience laughs. If the joke flies wide or falls flat, the audience will groan and Carson will look wounded, then drop some self-deprecating aside that, like a slow fuse, will finally ignite the gag. Dick Cavett, who worked for Carson as a writer, recalls that Carson "made a point of bombing and making it funny. Sometimes you'd write strictly for that. You'd set up one baddie, just for the saver." A lot of comedians have done this, but none...
...shorthand composed of repeated, encapsulated jokes. "Needing the eggs" is her analytic code for a type of humor she never defines, but which can be deduced to be the sober, questing, wistful quality in Allen that sends him harking after illusions. Likewise, the Take the Money and Run gag in which inept crook Virgil Stark well whittles a soap gun in jail, only to have it dissolve in the rain, becomes the officiated symbol of Allen's early humor, heavily based on such lively incongruities. To suggest a more subtle gagging which marked Allen's work from the earliest, there...
...Allen have more fun with it? No film labeled a sex comedy should offer the truism "Marriage is the death of hope" four times, to be written on the blackboard of the moviegoer's mind. No Woody Allen comedy should mosey for arid stretches without a well-turned gag. And no director should insist that actresses like Farrow and Steenburgen affect the wild ringlets and neurotic stammer of previous Allen girleens...
...congressional amendment has the vigorous support of Ronald Reagan. The President last week pressed hard for it and another favorite idea, his New Federalism program; he journeyed to Baltimore to plug that plan at a gathering of county officials and found himself hugging a gag gift of a stuffed "presidential seal." But his mood was stern in the White House Rose Garden, where he told reporters after a meeting with amendment supporters: "We must not, and we will not, permit prospects for lasting economic recovery to be buried beneath an endless tide of red ink." Reagan this week plans...