Word: grouchos
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...with technological predictions, it is possible that flASH mobs contain the seeds of a more useful craze when combined with the political and cultural goals of SMart mobs. In these “SMASH mobs,” as one might call them, hundreds of smokers might appear in Groucho Marx noses and glasses and smoke surreptitiously outside City Hall to make a political statement about Boston’s recent ban on smoking in public places. SMASH mobs might also combine fun with social-capital building: hundreds of Cambridge residents might be told to don a funny hat, visit...
That was about it. And the finer critical minds were always dubious about him. "Bob Hope is a good radio comedian, with a pleasing presence, but not much more," critic James Agee wrote in his lament for the passing of comedy's Golden Age. Hope lacked Groucho's surrealism, Fields' misanthropy, Chaplin's soul, not to mention that element of the grotesque they all shared. Dapper and a trifle distant in his suit and tie, he also lacked their patience in building and extending gag sequences. Typical American that he was, he always wanted the instant gratification...
...general debility, indigence, and mental aberration. My parents used to have me up before nine o'clock in the morning sometimes when I was a boy. If they had let me take my natural rest where would I have been now? Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by all." Groucho Marx, in his memoirs, also picked up the theme. "'Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man you-know-what.' This is a lot of hoopla. Most wealthy people I know like to sleep late, and will fire the help if they are disturbed before three in the afternoon...
...book, however, is far from satisfying. In tone it alternates between a voice so low key as to verge on dull and a stuffy attempt to make the book appear more scholarly than it is. Hemley's humor is always just off target, or trite, or both. "To paraphrase Groucho Marx, we don't want to be members of a human race that would have us as members"; it almost makes sense, but for that, no cigar...
...Wood). Through his pen, inanity became animate, and caricature met character study. The fun in a Hirschfeld sketch increased after 1945, when his daughter Nina was born. He began concealing her cognomen in and around his portraits of famous men and women--in a Gwyneth Paltrow gown, in a Groucho jacket fold--placing a numeral next to his signature to indicate how many Ninas appeared therein. It was the niftiest Sunday parlor game, a gift from the Shavian Santa who, with the delineation in a thin line, created the joy of seraphic graphic art. --By Richard Corliss...