Word: punster
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...home, Interior Secretary James Watt was the man readers loved to hate. An Aug. 23 cover story on Watt and his policies, "Land Sale of the Century," set 268 mostly hostile pens to work. "Watt an obnoxious character behind that repulsive face on the cover!" said one punster. The rest of the Reagan Administration, including the President, was also attacked, and a majority of those who expressed themselves rejected dense pack, Reaganomics, the New Federalism and support for Central American dictatorships. Said one observer: "The Emperor has no clothes, and the Empress has too many...
...core of it must remain as elusive as the mystery of why Rembrandt handled chiaroscuro so masterfully; it was an inborn gift, honed by practice but unteachable. Nobel-prizewinning Physicist Isidor I. Rabi, for one, maintains that Edison could no more have stopped himself from inventing than a born punster can refrain from playing word games. Robert Conot, author of a 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized the creations and endeavors." He was supremely self-confident; if prevailing opinion...
Surrounded by his wife "Tiger," his brother Stewart, two of his six children and former Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, elated Arizona Congressman and inveterate Punster Morris (Mo) Udall told his cheering supporters at the Sheraton-Boston Hotel that "with the results here in Massachusetts, we've got mo-men turn." Indeed, after second-place showings in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the once obscure Representative and ex-pro basketball player now does have a strong surge of forward motion-at least among liberal Democrats. Senator Birch Bayh's followers in New York State, scene of Udall's next...
...interests, Assistant Art Director Arturo Cazeneuve sent out an interoffice memo: "As the kipper of high standards, I want to say just for the halibut that your story is rather scampi in detail." Conditions last week would have been even worse except for the temporary absence of our champion punster, Cinema Critic Stefan Kanfer. In self-defense. Kanfer observes that puns show up in the most ancient writings, and "what was occasional in the classicists was fecund nature to Shakespeare...
Died. Bennett Cerf, 73, book publisher (Random House), nonstop punster and professional TV gamesman; in Mount Kisco, N.Y. After graduating from Columbia in 1919, Cerf bought his way into the book trade as a vice president of Boni & Liveright; in 1925 he borrowed from a wealthy uncle on Wall Street to buy the Modern Library from that failing firm for $200,000, later used its reprint profits to form a new company that would publish books at random, hence the name Random House. Despite his latter-day public reputation as syndicated humorist and smirking jokester of TV's What...