Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...radio's hierarchy, nothing is much lower than a summer replacement. Few performers make the grade from an easy summer show to the rigorous winter competition. This week a comedian made it. Jack Paar, an unpredictable young man (29) with a windblown sense of humor, was kept on by the American Tobacco Co. and given cozy quarters (9:30 to 10 p.m.-between Abbott & Costello and Bing Crosby) on ABC's Wednesday night program powerhouse...
...puzzle. As a summer fill-in for Veteran Jack Benny, Paar has set no new records. His Hooperating, beginning with a mild 10.2 on June 1, drooped steadily to an ominous 4.8 in late summer. Radio people had all but dismissed him as a heady, handsome prima donna whose humor was too specialized and too sophisticated...
Paar has been kicking this kind of humor around show business for eleven years. Born in Canton, Ohio, he began training early. "I was a sensitive boy," he says grandly. "Moody. A mad, mad thing even then." He landed his first job at 18 announcing in Indianapolis. He "loved" radio, he says, but the station did not love him. He lost half a dozen jobs because he could not make the broadcast on time ("Hell, I was at my typewriter creating...
Perhaps one of the greatest faults in "Acres and Pains" is Mr. Perelman's singularly bad choice of an illustrator. R. Osborn appears much more at home snarling at the backside of an Army Brass Hat than attempting to convey the tone of Perelman's brand of humor. The vicious, Stieg-like cartoons that made his fame in "War Is No Damned Good" have no place beside Perelman's cutting, though entireless harmless, wit. Some of the drawings are excellent, particularly a picture of two bloodthirsty children, but for the largest part they misfire and confuse the effect. These badly...
...play that is just two hours long should not attempt to do too much, and this one tries unsuccessfully to combine serious thinking about the problems of a modern, liberal scientist with a pixie-like humor derived from having a character play the scientist's mind. Raymond Massey, as the former, reads the New Republic and for three acts carefully compares the validity of his duties to his family and to the world. Meanwhile an assortment of bad and middling actors walk in and out, dramatizing the arguments each way. This sort of thing begins to be terribly tedious toward...