Word: gaggings
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Fairbanks was an ordinary young ham, except for his superior muscles, until one day on the stage in a serious moment he recalled a gag another actor had told him offstage a few minutes before. Against his will, irresistibly, he grinned. The effect was electric. Irresistibly Doug Fairbanks grinned and leaped his way to stage success as a bounding Lothario, a leaping Lochinvar who made love on the bounce. Hollywood gave him higher walls to scale, longer ropes to swing on, scores more swordsmen to engage in single-handed combat. His first picture, The Lamb, jumped his first ten-week...
Tortoisy Mr. Taft was nowhere. He had piled one inept act on another, bumbled when the script called for a gag, stumbled over his own and others' feet. In Iowa he denounced corn loans the day the Agriculture Department unloosed $70,000,000 in corn loans to Iowa; in Kansas City he crossed a year-old A. F. of L. picket line for no good reason; in Texas he shot his first deer, his first turkey, was photographed in business suit and starched collar gingerly holding the dead bird-a picture that brought a wave of nostalgic memories...
...Sample: When Bad Girl Dietrich slips some gold coins into her bosom, says Allen Jenkins: "Thar's gold in them thar hills." Last week the Hays office pounced on this gag after the picture's release, ordered it deleted...
...rather like P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster . . . with a receding chin, a questing nose, thin, yellow hair brushed back, a monocle, a vacant eye, a gardenia in his buttonhole." Fancying a creature like this at the Zeesen mike, Britons nowadays consider it a great gag when Lord Haw-Haw says, sententiously: "Britain, your naval prestige is destroyed. We Germans now command the seas. A submarine can dive many times; a capital ship only once...
...Kieran, omniscient sports columnist for the New York Times; grumpish F. P. A. (Franklin Pierce Adams), old-school New York Post columnist "who can't remember a thing that's happened in the last ten years, but remembers everything before that"; glib Oscar Levant, composer, super-pianist, gag-stacked Broad-wayfarer-are acknowledged by listeners as U. S.'s most knowing know-it-alls. Master of Ceremonies Clifton Fadiman is famous for beating the experts to the pun while he puts the pick of 75,000 questions submitted each week by listeners...