Word: wisecrack
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...historian of art is bound to answer. Cubism was not about cubes, nor Fauvism about wild beasts. When in 1905 an affable critic looked round the Paris Salon d'Automne, which contained an Italianate bust surrounded by the paintings of Henri Matisse and his disciples, he made a wisecrack about "Donatella chez les fauves" (Donatello among the wild beasts), thus giving a short-lived movement a very durable and misleading label. Fauvism was worked out by a small group of artists over a span of three years; it was dead by 1907. It could coarsely be defined as what...
Public Putdown. The wisecrack was an extraordinary bit of prenegotiation banter and an embarrassingly public putdown of Kissinger. Still, after eight hours of bargaining with Brezhnev across a felt-topped table and another four hours of talks with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Kissinger left Moscow with something to show for his journey...
...Pythons' uniquely English nonsense is moot. Their comedy is crowded with jokes about British TV announcers and politicians; their best sketches are intimate parodies of the idiocies of British life. Moreover, their style is the opposite of hard-hitting American humor. The Pythons can hardly summon a wisecrack among them. However, Program Director Ron Devillier of KERA in Dallas knows what endears them to Americans: "They have a nice sense of sex." Says a Philadelphia insurance broker: "They're the only real people on television...
...girls are simply not credited with, say, Columbo's powers of ratiocination or Kojak's ability to get off a cynical wisecrack...
...wisecrack about France's prestigious civil service academy, L'Ecole Nationale d'Administration, has two graduating students bidding each other goodbye in the Paris courtyard, when one says to the other: "See you at the Elysée Palace in 20 years." That is no longer a joke. Having won last month's presidential election, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, one of the E.N.A.'s most brilliant graduates (class of '51), has not only taken over the Elysée but he also seems to have brought half of his old school with...