Word: manna
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Newhart has more or less fathered a new generation of more or less polite comedians-not all the new faces in the field, but many of them. Charlie Manna, for one, is a typical new comedian on the nightclub circuit whose material never offends either the intelligence or the sensibilities of his audiences. He is a Bronx-accented New Yorker now working in the Catskills. His relaxed monologues are zany but sub-psychotic, riddled with implausibilities but not with disease...
Ships & Caesars. Manna is adept at verbal slapstick. He is the fellow who created in the night boites of Cocoa Beach the astronaut who refused to be blasted off until his missing crayons were found. In another routine, he lands the first men on the moon-with such a jolt that their trousers fall down. He has some good one-liners. "I don't talk about Liz Taylor because some day it will be my turn," he says. He also notes that he never talks about his wife because "what's done is done...
...best things, however, are his solo playlets. In one routine, he gets inside the human body and runs it like a ship: "Now hear this. Now hear this. All glands-secrete, secrete." Once an aspiring opera singer, Manna scores another sequence with his noteworthy tenor as he graduates the barber of Seville from barber school with a Phi Beta and has him refuse to part a man's hair from ear to ear lest people whisper into the fellow's nose. And in an inspired version of the death of Caesar, he has Caesar standing in the Forum...
...Ford thus poured massive manna into everything from overseas development ($46 million) to U.S. education ($125.3 million). Sample fields of action...
Occidental College is an oak-and-eucalyptus oasis of Italian Renaissance buildings dotting a green hillside on the northeastern fringe of hurly-burly Los Angeles. Its campus is small (120 acres), and- so is its coed student body (1,400). When the Ford Foundation bestowed its massive manna on liberal arts colleges last month, "Oxy's" $2,500,000 was the biggest Ford grant west of the Mississippi...