Word: witness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Although recent tilts in the Cambridge field of humor have been a bit disappointing, it appears from a story found in a recent issue of the "Daily Princetonian" that true wit has not yet died. It seems that two editors of the enterprising "Cornell Sun", determined to achieve the hoax of the year, produced a fiction by the name of Hugo N. Frye the founder of the Republican Party in New York State, and decided to hold a Sesquicentennial celebration in his honor...
...desired a humorist in the White House are beginning to perk up. Only a few months ago the Chief Executive also headlined the Fourth Estate with the fervent desire that the London Naval Conference would bring about "a definite slash in armaments," not merely a limitation treaty. The Washington Wit scores not so much in this amusing reversal of form as in the revelation that both of these Spectacles for the People were after all, only "mimic Games"; one a peace-puzzle of comic sections and the other a panorama of toy ships for a little boy-god named Mars...
...been amusing myself this winter by taking a correspondence course in Versification. After a time there came a lesson on tumbling alliterative verse. This is a very peculiar form and requires a subject rather out of the ordinary. It rolls along in voluminous strides, and I was at my wit's end for something to write about. It seems to me that it was in February while reading your magazine that I chanced upon a little paragraph telling about an elephant's stampede in India. Here I thought was the longed for material for my verse...
Show Girl in Hollywood (First National). The adventures of Joseph Patrick McEvoy's laboriously vivacious heroine are continued in a sequel to Show Girl which is rather duller than its predecessor. Alice White's saucy face and impish dancing tide over long sequences of shoptalk garnished with heavy-handed wit. Best role: Blanche Sweet as a fading beauty of the screen who sings a song to the effect that "there is a tear for every smile in Hollywood...
...most of the acts are boring. Director Anderson has made the picture a vehicle for glorifying stagecraft instead of using stagecraft to sharpen entertainment. Actually the entertainment value of King of Jazz is considerably less than that of an unelaborated concert by the Whiteman orchestra; the level of wit is indicated by such parodies as "All Noisy on the Eastern Front" and the "Bridal Veil" number in which, to an incredibly stupid lyric, "the brides of long ago" parade as they have paraded in vaudeville for 15 years...