Word: punster
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...director of Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corp. Once in 1911 he tried his hand at composition-a simple air entitled Melody in A Major. A friend liked it and sold it to a publisher for $100. Wrote Banker Dawes in his diary: "I know . . . my punster friends will say that if all the notes in my bank are as bad as my musical ones, they are not worth the paper they are written...
...fractional, silence is integral." Thoreau early loathed the time-serving bondage in which he pictured most of his fellow men as trapped, leading lives of quiet desperation: "What is sacrificed to time is lost to eternity." Regarding newspaper-reading as a monstrous waste of time, Thoreau later played the punster with this epigram: "Read not the Times. Read the eternities...
While some staffers thought the pun too corny and the sentence open to literal interpretation by the fast reader, none questioned the propriety of printing it. For the punster, betrayed by his nom de plume, was none other than the Times's Publisher and Board Chairman Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who frequently writes a quiet little letter to the editor...
Mourning the japesters' heyday of James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Frank Sullivan and Robert Benchley, aging (54) Poetical Punster Ogden Nash laid the blame for lost laughter to the cold war and a generation of young writers "who feel it their business to attack incest." Invited by Night Beat TV Interviewer Al Morgan to select one poem from the Golden Trashery of Ogden Nashery most likely to survive the ice age 'of creeping exurbia and the great woolly adman, Nash moodily recalled "some hair-of-the-dog-gerel from my unregenerate youth: 'Candy is dandy, but liquor...
...splashless launching all over again on radio. From week to week such sophisticated raconteurs as Bennett Cerf, Marc Connelly, Abe Burrows, Steve Allen and Sam Levenson join Fadiman for the kind of lively gab that has not been heard on radio since the old days of Information Please. Item: Punster Cerf's line about Ireland's Poet George ("A E") Russell and an angry moment when "A E's Irish rose." The next step, in the normal course of events, is back to television. Meantime, NBC, in the belief that talk is cheap, is footing the radio...