Word: pompousity
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...humor, ornithologically considered, consists largely in giving somebody the bird: cuckoo, mocking-bird or pompous ostrich. Funnyman Thurber's is half-ostrich, half-cuckoo; Funnyman Gibbs's is all mocking-bird...
...Priest of the school by now. ... To see one of Peter Arno's illustrations of a one-line observation made by a dowager in a theater lobby or a young man in a porch hammock is to realize that, so long as people go on saying incongruous or pompous things, this young man will never lack for oysters, for the world is his." The Arno type of humorous drawing is hard to define, easy to recognize. The pictures that make you laugh are ludicrous, often slightly mad but always obvious; the pictures that make you snicker are allusive, satirical...
...peeping completely, universally possible; any mention of the prim old-fashioned girls of 1930 will be regarded as funny. In 1980, however, musical comedies will still be full of jokes that have been doing service for years; songs will not have improved; heroines will be coy and leading men pompous. These suggestions spectators will absorb from De Sylva, Brown & Henderson's mechanically amusing musi-comedy. A theme which has been useful to H. G. Wells and Jules Verne they have executed in the fantasies of a tired vaudeville booking-agent. Just Imagine is much too long, and in spite...
...saloon, the son (Alexander Kirkland) of whose ponderous proprietor (Dudley Digges) is sea-struck. He must choose between going to the South Seas and remaining with his sweetheart (Frances Torchiana), both families being longtime friends. Throughout this tale of youthful self-sacrifice are interpolated visitors to the estaminet: a pompous ferryboat commander who is touchy on the subject of his wife's fidelity; the roguish, lovable saloonkeeper; able Guy Kibbee (late mortuary supply salesman of Torch Song) who is in love with Miss Torchiana. Marseilles is not a particularly strong play, but it is worth seeing...
Elizabeth The Queen is a sabre-rattling, pompous historical pageant which relates Maxwell Anderson's idea of the love of the Virgin Queen for the Earl of Essex. Author Lytton Strachey's notion to the contrary, Mr. Anderson's Elizabeth (Lynn Fontanne) and Essex (Alfred Lunt) are heroic amorists whose sturdy devotion is thwarted only because they love power more. To indicate her robustness Mrs. Lunt feels called upon to pitch her usually pleasant voice very deep in her throat and to speak her lines as loudly as possible, the effect of which is not unlike...