Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
Sentiment scotches the wit in "About Last Night," an expansion and dilution of David Mamet's 1974 one-acter Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Written as a series of blackout scenes involving two working-class pals and the two young women they fancy, the play was rancid, funny and dead-on-target. So why would Screenwriters Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue want to turn it into a Pillow Talk for the nouveau quiche set? Now the story is about a nice girl (the exemplary Demi Moore) and a pretty guy (Rob Lowe) who triumph over their busybody buddies (Elizabeth Perkins...
When writing his steely, intensely violent mysteries, the novelist who is otherwise known as Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle, Last Summer) calls himself Ed McBain. Fans have learned that the McBain byline promises wit, shrewd plotting and downbeat realism, but also allows for great variety. His 47th and 48th books demonstrate that range. Cinderella is a gem of sting and countersting among a prostitute, a gay hairdresser, a Latin American drug king, a Mafioso, his brutal brother, and assorted innocents who get hurt. The action keeps up until the final sentence. Another Part of the City is a thriller about...
Classmates and professors recall Nino as exceptionally bright, diligent, and fun to be around. He loved to argue in an unassuming way, usually espousing a conservative view point. He made people laugh with his quick wit, they say, told good Italian jokes and played the bugle surprisingly well...
...pulp pages of this monthly. At no extra cost, Black Mask came wrapped in an irony. It was founded with $500 in 1920 by the journalist and scholar H.L. Mencken and the playwright George Jean Nathan as a way of financing the unprofitable Smart Set, their magazine of uptown wit and sophisticated prose. The "louse," as Mencken called his detective journal, was an immediate success, and in six months he sold it for $100,000, the price of 10 million words...