Word: wisecracked
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...life, he no longer cruises about in his old Chevrolet station wagon; he now rides in a bulletproof ZIM. His public appearances are limited to ten minutes each, and no stranger is allowed within 20 yards of him. In Baghdad, for the first time, there is even an occasional wisecrack about...
...Tenth Man. Playwright Paddy Chayefsky has juxtaposed chant and wisecrack, surrealism and photography, insanity and farce in his story about a young girl believed possessed by an evil spirit, and though the play fails philosophically, it remains a genuine theater piece...
...life itself, who has been brought in off the street to make a quorum for morning prayers. Except for an aged rabbi, even the elderly Jews who show up largely lack faith; they come out of habit or boredom, or as to a club where they can gossip and wisecrack and argue various isms. One of them brings his 18-year-old granddaughter, a schizophrenic who has been in and out of asylums and who, he thinks, is possessed of a dybbuk or evil spirit that must be exorcised. Amid prayer and prattle, amid the girl's infatuation...
...what it juxtaposes and contrasts-chant and wisecrack, surrealism and photography, insanity and farce, demonology and Freud-The Tenth Man is telling and sharp. And Playwright Chayefsky has an equally good ear for the colloquial speech of his Jews as for their dialectical pomposities. But in spattering its theatrical vignettes with philosophic question marks, The Tenth Man takes on obligations it does not meet. Far from turning fantasy into vision, it fails to save it from sentimentality. Not only are all the play's characters uniformly nice, but exorcism seems a convenient miracle drug, and the happily vanishing young...
...Berliner's password is "Mir kann keener"-"Nobody can put anything over on me"-and his instinctive reaction to totalitarianism, as it is to anything highfalutin, is a deflating wisecrack. The airlift memorial at which last week's anniversary ceremonies began is universally known to Berliners as "the Hunger Claw"; a modernistic postwar church that looks as though a train might pull into it at any moment is called "Jesus Station." When Berliners use the high-flown expressions coined to describe their city's cold-war role-"the beacon of freedom" or "the show window of democracy...