Word: gaggingly
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Playwright Teichmann's own screwball inventions do not pay off anywhere near so well. The Girls in 509 has truly funny moments, when a gag cuts sharp as a razor, or a prop turns into a vise. But a situation that never develops the slightest bit of story has to be relentlessly kept going with comic-strip characters and hit-or-miss gags. Worse, loud and obvious staging that only Peggy Wood knows how to rise above underlines everything that is tiresome, or tinny, or both. Actually, The Girls in 509 has just enough winning gags and gadgets...
Show business is the common-and uncommonly interesting-denominator of the immortal and the merely diverting, the sublime and the corny, the Greek amphitheater and the burlesque runway. It includes Bernard Shaw and the TV gag writer, Laurence Olivier and the Las Vegas chorus girl -as well as their audiences. TIME'S new section will report "Show Biz" in all its phases. It will include news, trends and personalities of movies, theater, television, nightclubs, pop music. It will report on the more offbeat corners such as carnivals and beauty contests. And it will cover the vast supporting cast...
...mother and Billy Graham think he should have been a minister. He himself thinks perhaps he should have tried to be a missionary, like Albert Schweitzer. Some of television's unseen but much-heard word merchants think he would have made a fine gag writer. Walter Winchell plainly thinks he should have been put into an ablative nose cone on a one-way rocket trip to the moon. Sponsors of late movies think he should have stayed in daytime television, and all across the land, people who like to go to sleep early think he should have stood...
Most of the time, Paar is merely a good listener with a knack of asking the right questions. He may be as fast on the ad-lib draw as the next gag-toting desperado, but again and again he lets himself be "topped." He is all the world's straight man. And yet, Paar can hit. A caustic remark, a misconstrued question, a real or fancied attack in or out of the studio can provoke stinging repartee. When Winchell attacked him for a misstatement made by Elsa Maxwell on the show, Paar counterpunched fiercely, guessed-on the air-that...
After a while, even M. Charles begins to gag on life Chez Pavan, offers his own desperate diagnosis: "Perhaps I should go to an alienist...