Word: pompousity
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...radio, the venerable Jack Benny Show (Sun. 7 p.m., CBS) began its 19th year before a studio audience so enthusiastic that even the commercial (for Lucky Strike) got as much welcoming applause as any of the cast. By now, 56-year-old Jack Benny's tightwad, pompous radio personality has become a U.S. institution, and the show's humor lies as much in his familiar character as in comic invention. As always, Benny played the foil for the acid comment of his wife, Mary Livingstone, the booming illiteracy of Bandleader Phil Harris, the naive malevolence of Singer Dennis...
...tell you, son," one early Bostonian informed "an honest, ingenious countryman" with pompous condescension, "the Devil is dead...
French Scholar Andre Morize (Learn not "to talk with your hand in front of your mouth: it does not help!"), Historian David Owen ("Don't let yourselves become pedantic and pompous"), Biologist William H. Weston ("Never . . . feel an envious resentment toward [a student] if ... he shows promise of surpassing you"). Well up front, the Handbook offers a general caution or two about the whole profession. Writes famed Semanticist Ivor Armstrong Richards, after eleven years as a teacher at Harvard: "It's a daunting business being a professor . . . You will have, if you join this curious trade, to walk...
...horse racing. It is a smooth combination of comedy and pathos, romance and excitement, plus some pleasant Crosby crooning (notably, Let's Bake a Sunshine Cake). Like all Capra pictures, it is also calculated to delight the largest possible audience by taking potshots at the greedy and the pompous, while letting the meek inherit the earth...
...risking originality, the songs and dances give the movie some zest. Too often they display the outworn grotesqueries of Carmen Miranda and the excessive juvenility of Actress Powell. Occasionally, to denote conscious hamming by members of the heroine's acting fam ily, the soundtrack breaks into a few pompous bars of Wagner. It is not much of a gag, but it is a handy guide to the intentions of the players...