Word: gaggingly
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...horned" creature "acomin' out of the sky" to "get a job in a rock-'n'-roll band." Oklahoma-born Singer Wooley, 37, who has written hits such as Too Young to Tango and appeared in westerns (High Noon) as a badman, got his inspiration from a gag riddle posed by the child of a friend: "What has one eye, one horn, flies and eats people?" (Answer: a one-eyed, one-horned, flying people eater.) Wooley composed the song in an hour, hyped the People Eater's voice in currently approved fashion; he achieved the toy saxophone...
...transcendentalist, Thoreau saw spirit at the heart of matter. But he was never so genteel as to gag at reality. "Let a man reserve a good appetite for his peck of dirt," he wrote, "and expect his chief wealth in unwashed diamonds." At 23, Thoreau was already grappling with the central dilemma of his life, how to know himself and be himself under the raised eyebrow of conformist society: "It is always easy to infringe the law-but the Bedouins of the desert find it impossible to resist public opinion...
...time to bring out all the old jokes, time for some radio clown to pose the 75 million-franc question: "Name all the French Premiers since 1947," and for the cocktail-party gag, "Do you think the Algerians will get a government before we do?" Some Frenchmen, it is true, seem to regard the crisis as the next-to-last straw. Thunders Editor Pierre Brisson in Figaro: "It is no longer a Parliament, but a monstrous jamming enterprise. The conclusion is to reform or disappear. The margin for the Assembly is only a thread's width." But, unhappily...
Some nights, everything just goes right. I Am a Camera is very funny, but it is more than a ramshackle frame on which gag lines are hung. Playwright John Van Druten found some real people in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, and around them he built a real play. He does not go very deeply into the question he raises of hedonism versus social involvement, but it is nice to have an issue to fill the brief spaces between laughs...
...gag spread, the officials were more jubilant than embarrassed. Their hit record is drawing 5,000 callers a day-so heavy a load that two of their five answering machines burned out and had to be repaired. The payoff: prompted by the message, 70 VD victims daily are telephoning for help. Says one official: "Every case cured helps us to break the chain of infection. We could have spent thousands on propaganda and never begun to get such results...