Word: patters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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These lines belong to a fast-beat patter song, Missouri Walking Preacher, written in 1949. It was recorded and did fairly well in Midwestern jukeboxes, though it never made the hit parade...
...characterization, the real-life TV show was better than the movies. When lush Virginia Hill ("I didn't keep any books or accounts or anything") left the witness stand to a patter of applause, televiewers felt they knew all they needed to know about the free-spending, fur-bearing ex-waitress. Similarly, an urbane, aging Republican politician named Charles Lipsky revealed himself as a road-company Machiavelli hopelessly fascinated by criminal and political types ("I just loved to study Joe Adonis"). And Frank Costello, refusing to have his face televised, and finally refusing to talk at all while...
Almost every other comic has nervously surrounded himself with elaborate props for his entry into television. Jimmy Durante brought only his nose, his piano, his rasp-voiced songs and patter, and sat down like an old friend in the televiewer's living room. Durante and TV were a long time getting together, but it was well worth the wait...
...falling. The patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan--composed of both speech and music--leave it undecided. "But when the words are subordinate to the music as they are in opera," according to Jones, "the device will not interrupt the singing...
...Vaudevillians Burns & Allen are not likely to disappoint their fans. Pointing up Gracie's gags, Straightman George uses a slow-burn delivery and purse-mouthed pauses ("A man drowned once while I was pausing"). Compared to the machine-gun patter of most TV comics, his style gives the show a relaxed, almost leisurely pace. A high point of the program: Gracie's dubious plugs for Carnation Milk ("I don't see how they get milk from carnations...