Word: joker
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...JOKER (319 pp.)-Jean Malaquais -Doubleday...
...Confidential Clerk Eliot again presents what looks like a group of very worldly people. In the first act he encourages us to assimilate them to familiar theatrical types. Lucasta Angel is a rather spoiled and forward young woman. B. Kaghan is a flashy sort of practical joker who is amusingly disrespectful concerning Lady Elizabeth, the absent-minded dowager who dabbles in spiritualism. After the first act there was much disappointed all in the lobby about the predictable lines, tired characterizations, and old fashioned exposition. In the second act our conceptions of these characters are wrenched out of shape. In response...
...look more or less human. Unanswered still was the question of who had planted the fake. Dawson, who died in 1916 and whose monument stands near the Piltdown gravel pit, may have doctored the jawbone to make himself famous. More likely, the difficult hoax was perpetrated by an erudite joker who enjoyed in silent satisfaction his success in fooling the experts...
...professor said he doesn't believe for a moment that Charles Dawson, the attorney and amateur antiquarian who discovered the skull, is the perpetrator of the hoax. "I'm only guessing." he said, "but I think the joker was one of the technicians in the British Museum who had an ambition to fool the experts...
Even the works of the usually inimitable Updike have ceased to shine, and only glimmer fitfully through the morose aura which surrounds the magazine. This is probably the result of understandable fatigue, since this joker has been responsible for the bulk of the magazine's readable contents over a period of nearly two years...