Word: verbal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...others doing it. Kelly shrewdly narrows his focus to just the wrongdoers, not the colleagues who never joined -- or, in at least some cases, were not asked. Most of the locker-room dialogue is persuasive, blending easy badinage with underlying detachment. By far the most effective scenes are the verbal dances in which the players stumble into conspiracy, each looking to the other for guidance...
...excavation has provided ample proof of Kovacs' prodigious achievement. Not that all of it is funny. Much of Kovacs' comedy strikes a viewer today as rather obvious and crudely executed. Steve Allen, another pioneer of live TV comedy, was a more dexterous verbal wit; Sid Caesar a more inspired sketch comic. Kovacs' contribution lay elsewhere. No performer, for one thing, was more at ease in front of the TV camera or treated it with such relaxed irreverence. Kovacs' live shows were an engaging mix of scripted bits (with such recurring characters as the lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils) and raucous improvisation...
Attempts to draw too much significance from these athletes' situation is part of the play's problem. Through all the verbal jabbing, backstabbing and competition, the players, teammates for the past six years, realize that their jobs are not what they're going to miss most about being cut. Instead, not too surprisingly and too cliched, they are going to miss each other. When the moralizing commences and the banter begins to lose its freshness, sometime mid-way through the second act, the play starts to drag...
...books, exclaimed one French critic, "possess all the passionate excess of Rabelais' Gargantua, the verbal virtuosity of a Joyce, the demonic cruelty of Celine's best work." Mon dieu, who is this born-again Shakespeare? Charles Bukowski. You know, the 64-year-old Los Angeles-based laureate of American lowlife whose Henry Miller-ish paeans to booze and broads (Love Is a Dog for Hell, Notes of a Dirty Old Man) typically sell only around 5,000 copies in the U.S. In France, more than 100,000 copies of the Boho's short and tall stories have left the shelves...
...plaintive interoffice memo on Oct. 1, 1985, saying, "HELP! The seal task force is constantly being delayed by every possible means . . . The allegiance to the O-ring investigation task force is very limited to a group of engineers numbering 8-10 . . . We wish we could get action by verbal request, but such is not the case. This is a red flag...