Word: punning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although the show's plot improves dramatically in the second act from the pun-fest of the first, it is merely a showcase of the characters and an occasion for the show's 15 musical numbers. The author, Nick Vanderbilt, throws in a few good lines between the songs, though...
...full of the nastiest kind of bigotry-that which is expressed with a show of sweet reason and charity. "Oppose," but don't "persecute." It matters little to the stunned brain in a fractured skull whether the deed was done in opposition or persecution. Give me straightforward (pun intended), honest, hotheaded persecution always in preference to the cold slime of tolerance and fairness such as yours...
...stuff we have to read causes cramps and vertigo," he mutters, warming himself up to a fine frenzy over "the works of Scriblerus X. Machina," as he dubs the bulletins from the chairman of the college's communications department, or perhaps the "feats of Clay," as he cruelly pun-points the communiqués of one Glassboro dean. "A detailed analysis," he worries out loud, "might well cause irreversible brain damage." But he risks it. One writer's offenses against God and good English, pretty much the same thing to Mitch, are carefully totted up: seven "comma faults...
...puns the punners pun-encore...
...using a unicorn horn for a corkscrew) and domestic explosions (father to a small boy who has nailed his Christmas stocking upside down: "You call that hung by the chimney with care?"). The Book of Terns by Peter Delacorte and Michael C. Witte is something else again. Every conceivable pun on the bird-word tern is illustrated, from tern of the screw to Comintern. A single-joke book, but a funny one, deserving of a big ternout. If the bird book rises from the dictionary, Hamburger Madness by Jack Ziegler bounces off the wall. The New Yorker's resident...