Word: humor
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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WANTED: Position as cartoonist with newspaper or magazine art department. I am American born, a high school graduate with character, good sense of humor, and ambition to earn and hold a cartoonist's job. Have studied subject five years, done mimeograph and pen-and-ink work, sold a few cartoons. Further samples of work and complete personal history, with references, upon request...
...family, if unconventional, are given to normal moments of joy and sorrow. After mixing Grandma's outrageous antics with her son-in-law's gruesome suicide and her granddaughter's rocky romance, The Primrose Path fails to come off as well as it might. For, though humor and pathos make the best of friends, realism and farce are immemorial foes...
Sitting on a piano at a party for Loyalist Spain in Washington, famed Writer & Wit Dorothy Parker nervously swore off humor: "I don't see how you can help being unhappy now. The humorist has never been happy, anyhow. Today he's whistling past worse graveyards to worse tunes. . . . If you had seen what I saw in Spain, you'd be serious too. And you'd be up on this piano, trying to help those people...
Admirers of the late Thome Smith, from whose books Topper and its sequel were derived, will doubtless be enchanted by the gaiety and humor of these proceedings. Less prejudiced cinemaddicts may feel that the comic possibilities of its trick photography are less inexhaustible than its producers supposed. Once the side-splitting spectacle of doors opening without apparent human aid has lost its novelty, the picture's only surprises are occasional droll antics by Actors Young and Burke, and a few scraps of bright dialogue. Best line: Mrs. Topper's comment on Gallic manners: "Too bad the people...
Outward Bound (by Sutton Vane; produced by The Playhouse Co.). Seeing an attractive play again after 15 years is usually as disillusioning as re-encountering a once-attractive woman. But Outward Bound comes off better than "well-preserved," still retains its humor, imaginativeness, suspense and its more elusive quality of "theatre." Profound, or even provocative, it never was; the play is effective just because it treats the idea of death simply, concretely, familiarly. The appeal of Playwright Sutton Vane's imagination is not its incandescence or daring, but its deep kinship with Everyman...