Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Silvers Show gave Bilko a chance to prove that noncoms really run the regiment, and week after week Bilko proved that he rated his stripes. Bolder than the brass he heckled, brasher than the brightest operator in his informal command, Bilko ran his outfit with the earthy, barracks-brand humor that can make service life (and TV watching) tolerable. He was one of those rare peacetime soldiers, a guy who never figured to need any "shipping over" music; any Army recruiting sergeant could recognize him as a 30-year man. But Phil Silvers' sponsors (Reynolds Tobacco, Schick Razor...
...haired, puckish San Franciscophile Herb Caen (pronounced Cane), 43, the columnist who defected to Hearst's morning Examiner in 1950 for a doubled salary of $30,000. In 1957, Prodigal Son Caen decided to return (for $38,000 a year), leaving the Examiner (circ. 257,251) with little humor to perk up its somber pages. "The day I knew we had come around the corner," says Publisher Thieriot, "is the day Herb Caen decided to come back." Looking over his figures for 1958, Thieriot had good evidence that he, Newhall and Caen, and a fired-up city-room staff...
...Sunnylands Grange Select Summer School for Boys" is a moth-Eton travesty of an English public school. Its playing fields of welfare-state spivs supply most of the antic humor to be found in this uneven first novel. Oliver Ventnor, the book's mock-hero, is sent down from Oxford for forging his uncle's name to a check. Stony-broke and stonily rebuked by his pastor father, Oliver signs on as a teaching "captain" at Sunnylands Grange...
Robinson displays a sure hand in manipulating the high humor of the quaint incidents which divert him. While his characters are not burdened with realism, they do have considerable vitality to them. If their language is complex and perhaps even elusive at times, it has a consistency and logic that emerge in a second reading. The logic and consistency seem a sign that the author has planned precisely where he is taking his characters; if their destination is not clear in the excerpt, readers doubtless will find clarification when they see the whole...
Once away from the Trasks and Alma, however, the "East of Eden" world is one of two-dimensional people and scenes. Actually, there is less use of folksy humor and other side show effects than there might have been. Elia Kazan's handling of the anti-German feeling during World I seemed very fine indeed, and the movie is worth seeing just to watch its town parade of victory girls, the Kaiser in a noose, and Important Citizens...