Word: humorlessness
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Carmichael, Attenborough, and Maleson all turn in slick comic performances, and Jill Adams, as Sally Smith, is sweetly seductive. All in all, the Boulting Brothers have dealt another subtle blow to the humorless corpse of time and institution, and college audiences and old ladies alike chortle in appreciation...
...understand why all the fuss about one bullfighter. As the show's Co-Scriptwriter Barnaby Conrad has often said before, Manolete was a slight man of grace, warmth and gentle humor outside the ring; but as played by Actor Jack (Requiem for a Heavyweight) Palance, he was awkward, humorless and uncommonly large in his baggy traje de luces. When Palance was not glooming about the bulls and that other, more ferocious enemy-the crowd-he was busy swilling expensive hooch ("We'd pay through the nose for this," he says) or displaying a sweaty torso effectively scarred...
From Brookline to Brooklyn, St. Louis to Dallas, in every college in the nation, the five years from eighteen to twenty-three have become a humorless, superficially serious time. Non-conformity itself has become indeed, for some, a conscious goal. But Bohemianism has evolved into a true "ism," with its established rules and procedures. And eccentricity, on longer loved for its very absurdity, is occasionally cultivated because, for some, it has become a standard value. Like liberalism, which has become a dull and dusty set of bromides after being handed down over two centuries, non-conformity itself is becoming...
...London sky lowered and thunder rolled in the distance as Harold Macmillan, pale and humorless, rose in the House of Commons last week to put an 'official stamp on the greatest British diplomatic reverse since Munich. "Her Majesty's Government," announced the Prime Minister, "can no longer advise British shipowners to refrain from using the Suez Canal." Payment of canal dues, he went on, would be made in sterling-though Egypt's pre-Suez balance of $300 million, which was blocked by the Eden government, would remain frozen. Curtly, Macmillan said: "A much longer view will decide...
...perhaps the Yearbook has given us an accurate record of undergraduate failure to react to these things. Its inadequacies reinforce the observations which have already been made about our generation--that we are humorless, dry, undirected, inconclusive like the Yearbook, quiet. Or perhaps the trouble is Harvard, a Harvard with maturity and an inconclusive orthodoxy. Whether the fault is in our generation, feeling baffled and helpless, or merely in an aged and bloodless Harvard, Seniors will presently discover...