Word: witnessed
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Thanatopsis. When Kaufman & Connelly hit the limelight with Dulcy in 1921, it was as more than rising young playwrights. They were part of a group which, by virtue of talent, wit and hobnobbing together, was coming to dominate the sophisticated Manhattan scene. Their lunch club, the Algonquin Hotel, had waked up one morning to find itself famous, and celebrity-chasers flocked there, as to a play, to observe Kaufman. Connelly, Broun, Woollcott, Benchley, Dorothy Parker, F.P.A. & Co. at lunch, and to hear their laughter, though not what gave rise to it. The male members enhanced their glamor by forming...
Back in its beginnings, a wit had cracked: "The only thing Rockefeller Center will be used for is a bird sanctuary...
Died. Opie Read, 86, homespinning Tennessee wit, last of the Mark Twain school, "greatest literary shortstop of his time"; of old age; in Chicago, Ill. Huge, gangling Opie Read wrote 55 books, edited the once famed humorous paper, The Arkansas Traveler. Like Oklahoma Wit Will Rogers, he belittled his own peculiarities by exaggerating those of others. Example: When a relative entered politics, said towering Opie Read: "He was so big that they didn't put him on a stump. They dug a hole for him to stand...
There is also some superb writing on certain sinister essences of the American South. In the later pages there is a slow withering of gaiety, of wit, of external interest, a dark and deepening absorption in the study of Buddhism, of the Bible in Hebrew, of the nature of reality, and of death, which at length is no longer feared. The journal ends in the aftermath of a gentle and casual dream: "Perhaps we shall be talking just like that when we awake from this life. Who could say that all our waking life was not a dream...
These neatly done bits of artistic wit show the sly, amatory advances of a curiously-moustached music teacher on his attractive young pupil. Our keyboard Casanova is just in the act of kissing his pretty protege when the raised piano-top, behind which they are hiding, expresses its disapproval by solidly falling on the heads of the two lovers. At the sound of the crash, an irate father rushes upon the scene and sternly reprimands his daughter for her licentious behaviour. Meanwhile, our fallen Caesar forsakes his Cleopatra and silently slinks out of the room...