Word: sketches
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...settler's daughter, leading up to the punch line: "Jesus always pays our ransom." The first step before each production is snaring the children. The pitch is announced as Adventure Time, and what is in effect a Sunday-school session is tricked out with puppets, magicians, quick-sketch artists and ventriloquists. The moppets' roars of approval bring the adults and teen-agers swarming around in a crowd that averages 500. After about 45 minutes the three-man team piles into its motor van and speeds off to another beach...
Head in the Way. To trap the ever-changing image of war, the three illustrated papers dispatched a mere handful of men-some 30 in all from beginning to end, and never more than a dozen at any one time. The rewards were low-about $5 to $25 per sketch for piecework-and the risks were high. One chill night, Harper's Artist Theodore R. Davis, sharing his threadbare blanket with a Union soldier, waked at dawn to find his bedfellow dead beside him. "It was plain.'' wrote Davis afterward, ''that but for the intervention...
...will say that since reading your life sketch, I feel much more sympathetic toward her, and she has gone up in my estimation...
...keeps hanging up the phone, a speck of dirt in a glass of milk, TV commercials, a dentist ominously taking X rays. Perhaps best known is his airline routine ("Coffee, tea or milk?" chirps the stewardess, although the wing is on fire); because of the recent disasters, the sketch has been retired, but many airlines still use the record during stewardess training. Berman builds his long routines forward and backward from initial jokes, as in his newest piece, which grew around a forlorn conventioner who is afraid that if he loses his name badge, no one will talk...
...while police raided their home. His father Nathan was a tavern owner, and he appears, in one of Berman's best routines, as a militantly bourgeois delicatessen keeper who rough-talkingly tenders a chunk of his life savings so that his son can go to acting school; the sketch ends with the father's soft-spoken request to the newborn star not to change his name. Berman actually went to Chicago's Goodman Theater acting school-and did not change his name. Nathan Berman now drives a truck in Chicago (as does Shelley's brother Ronald...