Word: idiot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cast cannot match the physical style of Mack Sennett, and Mad World's substitute for wit is the flaccid humor of insult. In dozens of roadside hassles, Ethel Merman as Berle's nerve-shattering mother-in-law begins almost every sentence with "Shuddup, you big stupid idiot...
That failing is too often apparent in this collection of short stories. The title story, for instance, tells of a dying man who travels about the city visiting friends, pawnbrokers, even a synagogue, trying to raise money to send his idiot son to relatives in California. He gets the money, but before he can put his son on the train he has to struggle with a ticket collector named Ginzburg-who turns out to be Death...
...bluster was for show, and rarely was he deeply, genuinely angry. One such occasion was on Pearl Harbor day. Riding home from a White House meeting on the night of Dec. 7, he was in tears of rage as he told a newsman: "That goddamned Frank Knox, that idiot, that fool. He told us only a week ago that the Navy was ready for anything. Now it's lying at the bottom of Pearl Harbor." As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and as an admirer of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations concept, Connally began working...
...retreat in the south of France reported that at the last the old man bitterly regretted ever having written it, confessing that he did it chiefly because he needed the money. But even before he finished the last chapter, he was suffering from brief spasms of self-knowledge. "Every idiot who has ever met me," he wrote, "talks of my extraordinary conceit. Perhaps, since my revelation of Shakespeare, I have taken myself too seriously...
...others. Because he was a famous young man, he could never anonymously fall down a flight of stairs or insult his hostess or make a howling clown of himself, because someone was always there industriously to record a momentary superiority to a man who had temporarily made an idiot of himself. He had the further bad fortune to be a romantic and, what is more, a romantic who was foolish enough to marry the heroine of his own novels. Scott's Zelda was the love object a worse and more prudent man would have rejected when the tinsel tarnished...