Word: gagged
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Died. Lew Parker, 64, comedian who most recently played Mario Thomas' father on her TV series That Girl; of cancer; in Manhattan. A durable comic of the gag-a-minute school, Parker graduated from vaudeville to radio, Broadway musicals and then to television. During the '50s he co-starred with Comedienne Frances Langford in the TV series The Bickersonsons...
Chimera is a coy variation on a number of Barth's favorite themes. Composed in three parts, "Dunyaza-diad," "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad," the book is largely a gag at the expense of conventional literary forms. Instead of having characters symbolize archetypes as most novelists do, Barth uses the archetypes themselves as characters. Fortunately for the reader, Barth -who is also an English professor at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York -provides a pony. (Pegasus by any name is just as helpful.) As he explains in Chimera: "Since myths themselves are among other things poetic distillations...
...assistants, neglected to mention it, but Harvard played a role quite as earnest as Dartmouth or Princeton in the ensuing hoopla. In a letter to Cong. John Erlenborn (R-Ill.), published in the Congressional Record, Daly detailed "educational and financial risks" which made private colleges such as Harvard gag at the plan. An aide to Greene later charged that the letter qualified as an overt act of lobbying...
...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...
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...