Word: nero
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Canned laughter rings, too often like hollow mockery, through virtually every filmed comedy show on TV. It is a hoary part of show business, at least as old as Nero who, in his ventures as an actor, packed his houses with as many as 5,000 soldiers under strict orders to appreciate him. The French refined it with the institution of the claque, with such specialists as rieurs* or laughers. In the heyday of U.S. radio, comics often helped a laugh along by kicking the announcer or pummeling the guest star to get studio audiences laughing at what unseeing hearers...
...that. In future weeks Gerald will preside over the same lively blend of the whimsical and the wacky. There will be cartoons on such artists and inventors as Henri Rousseau, Robert Fulton and Samuel F.B. Morse: the adventures of Dusty, a circus boy; comic versions of famous historic moments (Nero Fiddles, The Trojan Horse); etiquette lessons by a well-meaning but maladroit fop named Mr. Charmley...
...Paul Nero and his Hi Fiddles (Sunset). More fuel for an old dispute: Is it possible to play jazz on a violin? The present answer: sometimes. Nero, composer, arranger and onetime concert violinist, gets at least halfway out of the corn belt, at least in the string ensembles, but drops a few kernels while he burns...
...weak on ideas. In recent months he has gained new attention by his work for Punch, where the satiric ideas of Editor Malcolm Muggeridge often guide the Illingworth hand. A recent Illingworth-Muggeridge view of British politics showed Prime Minister Eden and Opposition Leader Hugh Gaitskell, both dressed as Nero, saying to each other: "I can fiddle a damned sight better than you." Other favorite targets have included Eisenhower, Bulganin and Khrushchev. In his latest cartoon on John Foster Dulles, Illingworth wasted no words in a biting, uncaptioned comment on the Secretary of State at work...
BEFORE MIDNIGHT, by Rex Stouf (184 pp.; Viking; $2.75), plunges Nero Wolfe, with his creator's usual sharp eye for the headlines, into the hypertense world of Manhattan advertising agencies and a $1,000,000 quiz contest sponsored by a perfume manufacturer. The murderer shows the bad taste and worse judgment to strike in Wolfe's own home. Not really baffling as a whodunit, but Archie Goodwin, Wolfe's legman, is reliably agreeable company as the yarn-spinner...