Word: punned
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...Along with French and German, he acquired a great many cultural tag lines and thriftily squirreled them away in the back of his mind for future use. Cavett is certainly the only comedian extant who could say, "Where did we get this obsession that exegesis saves? God forgive that pun." Cavett was of course show biz obsessed. He met Carrie Nye McGeoy, his future wife, while acting in a New Haven amateur production. After graduation he hung around Broadway theaters, cadged a job with Jack Paar as a jokesmith, wrote for Johnny Carson and tried his own nightclub...
...reverie, Gimpei Momoi, a 34-year-old schoolteacher, a dim cousin of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, disconsolately follows women, or schoolgirls, through the streets. Filled with a "masochistic self-disgust" that has its origins in his own deformed feet, Gim pei (which might almost be some accidental translingual pun - "Momoi the Gimp") is another of literature's repellent voyeurs - a wincing, hypersensitive defective on the sad trail of in effable beauty...
...Wizard of Oz. Words fail me. If you know the right ones, on the other hand, you can trade them in for a couple of ruby slippers. Under what guise did Ozma, the legitimate ruler whose place the Wizard took, pass the majority of her childhood? And a pun referring to what conveyance so offended even the long-suffering Jack Pumpkinhead that he momentarily stopped smiling? This weekend and next, 8 p.m. at Dunster House (also 11 on Saturday...
...quest for entertaining copy, the critic all too often falls into what I call the "Time Magazine Syndrome:" the witty dig, the cutting remark, the clever put-down. It usually takes the form of word-play--perhaps a pun on the film's title, or on an actor's name. Sometimes the put-downs are more involved, bringing in associations from previous films, or the personal lives of the people who made the film, or aspects of the film itself. The one thing that all forms of this syndrome have in common is that the put-down is gratuitous...
Novelist Leonard, 34, is the kind of man who can write the history of Western civilization on the head of a pun, with a little room to spare. That quality has helped make him one of the best popular critics going, as well as the editor of the New York Times Book Review section, but takes some getting used to in Leonard's fiction. In Black Conceit, for example, Leonard offers three different major characters: New Englander Kenneth Mackenzie Coffin, a young Wasp of means, qualms and wavering commitment to the New Left; Coffin's brilliant wife Marcy...