Word: witlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...witless complain that humor is impossible to write in an age when headlines are more absurd than the products of imagination. Richler's contemporary entries offer hilarious refutation. Excerpts from Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint belong on the shelf with Rabelais and Swift. Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode stands as a classic. In it, a professor of humanities is propelled backward in time to the arms of Madame Bovary and the pages of a remedial Spanish textbook: "He was running for his life over...
...company secretary, shot himself. Estimates of the number of margineers closed out varies from 20% to 70%. During the first three hours of Thursday stock valuations shrank about $11,250,000,000, recovered all but $3,000,000,000 before trading closed. Brokers met at Hornblower & Weeks, counseled against witless selling, thought the decline had spent itself in a day's volume of trading far exceeding anything ever known. On the Stock Exchange 12,894,650 shares changed hands...
...politics into programmed entertainment. The more extreme the event, the more TV air time it tends to get. James David Barber of Duke University believes that the networks will have more to say about who the presidential candidates will be next year than the political parties; hence all the witless clamor...
Sometimes a leader's pastimes imitate the way he governs. In his great biography of Stalin, Adam Ulam surmises that Stalin's sadism and recreation were allied. Stalin reveled in all-male, all-night banquets populated by middle-aged cronies drinking themselves witless and engaging in practical jokes. Among Stalin's favorites were placing a tomato on a chair about to be sat in and pushing friends into ponds. One can only imagine the hilarity and camaraderie at such occasions. One can also imagine the recognition on the faces of Stalin's former drinking buddies when...
...DeLuise again, less lucky than he is in The Secret of NIMH). His part is so badly written that he never develops either menace or humor. The rest of the movie talks dirty in a witless way, yet always looks cute and sanitized. In its roundheeled way it wants to please everyone...