Word: jokers
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...home a streetwalker and a thief. From there on the cynic and ironist in Maugham have a field day. Sheppey, his family feels sure, must be off his chump. The harlot and the thief, bored stiff by the good life, scamper back to the bad one. For a final joker, Maugham shows that the exemplary Sheppey really is sick: he has been having visions of a strange woman, who turns out to be Death and comes, at the end, to claim...
...extended a limp hand to his departing guest. Back at his desk, he thumbed through a sheaf of favorite reading-brilliant, witty reports from Washington on U.S. reaction to world events. Long and frowningly he gazed at the signatures, wondered if he had been the victim of a practical joker. Orders were barked, secretaries investigated, Churchill was enlightened. The "I. Berlin" on the reports was Isaiah Berlin, economist, not Irving Berlin, guest...
...chief failures are his, too. Some of the fun is painfully unfunny, because it is like a joker who outroars his audience's reaction. Some of the pity is not pitiful because it is smashed before it has a chance to crystallize. Most of the finest human and comic potentialities of the story are lost because Sturges is so much less interested in his characters than in using them as hobbyhorses for his own wit. His good friend and master, René Clair, is near the heart of it when he says, "Preston is like a man from...
Jokesmith's Art. In the training classes, mines and traps are mixed with a practical joker's devilish wit. Students quickly learn to be suspicious as the giant firecrackers explode when a truck is started, or a tool lifted. Students cannot be too suspicious for their own future good...
...year for doing so. An ex-newspaper reporter who got fired for writing news stories about people he had not interviewed, he is intimately acquainted with some of his radio characters (they are among his mother's best Bloomington friends). He is an incorrigible practical joker. He once named all of NBC's vice presidents in his script as a gang of jailbirds, and is given to telling strangers that his handsome wife is three-quarters Eskimo, allergic to heat...