Word: idiot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...state; his views on civil rights and economics are too liberal. Lately he has grown more interested in foreign relations, and may some day head in that direction. In any case, he is unlikely to abandon the seminary-bred notion of service. "Do you know that the word 'idiot' comes from the Greek?" asks Moyers, who studied the language in order to read the New Testament firsthand. "It means a man who did not participate in society." He adds: "This is a participant's generation, not a spectator generation." But he still expresses wonder at the exalted...
...were such distortions of life. If a maid ever took over my house like Hazel, I'd set her hair on fire. I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first." The idiot is Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, played by reformed Stand-Up Comic Don Adams. Smart has little piggy eyes, a voice that sounds like a jigsaw on slate, and a perpetual self-satisfied smirk. When challenged, he is too dumb to panic...
During the next 25 years, Robert Emmet Sherwood became successively a well-known movie and book reviewer, magazine editor, script doctor, playwright (Idiot's Delight, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, There Shall Be No Night) and speechwriter to President Roosevelt. In this effusive biography, Critic John Mason Brown leans heavily on the lighter side. The reader hears all about Sherwood's sensational buck and wing, his low-keyed Algonquin witticisms, his red-eyed passion for high-stakes poker, model airplanes, and croquet in Central Park at $10 a wicket. Unhappily, Biographer Brown requires 386 pages to take his subject...
Which is not to say that the Bond lode is worked out. NBC's parody, Get Smart, proves to be a very viable Fleming entry, mainly because it dares to be healthily sick when the competition is all sickeningly healthy. Straight-faced nasal Comic Don Adams plays Idiot Agent Maxwell Smart, an 0 bungling desperately to become an 007. In the opening episode, he was pitted against Mr. Big, played by Dwarf Michael (Ship of Fools) Dunn. Smart received a phone call during a black-tie concert from a receiver in his shoe. Then he sat down in Dunn...
...that same year, Chagall was made commissioner of fine arts in Vitebsk by the newly formed Soviet government, and as a commissar he rapidly demonstrated that he was a divine idiot. He called for "revolutionary painters" and peppered the local party press with commissarty exhortations. His vision of the revolution was to make "ordinary houses into museums and the average citizen into a creator." Imagining that all the house painters of his native town were repressed artists, he spurred them on to decorating its drab buildings with folk imagery. When his superiors arrived from Moscow to find the walls covered...