Word: witnessed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...late to work, leaves the office every night by 9 to dine with the family in his elegant Avenue Foch apartment. (Madame Gaillard, widow of one of France's wealthiest financiers, has two children by her previous marriage, a son by this one.) His chief handicaps: a malicious wit-"Nothing outside, nothing inside" was his verdict on a bald colleague-and the widespread feeling that he is a coldly ambitious golden boy "sunk in upper-class surroundings...
While building Punch into its readable and financially hale condition circ. (132,000), Muggeridge has also built Muggeridge into a major TV personality. As commentator and interviewer on the BBC (a favorite Punch target), he treats sentimentality, mediocrity and many a sacred cow with waspish wit, which, coupled with his upper-crust air, has made the popular press bill him as "the man you love to hate." Muggeridge will go on being fascinatingly hateful on TV, plans a novel and a biography of George (1984) Orwell. At Punch, where Muggeridge's brisk ways produced some sparks as well...
Such was Ronnie Knox's reputation for wit that the shock at Oxford was great when in 1939 he was assigned by his archbishop to make a new translation of the Bible. He retired to a friend's house in the country and set to work; it was to take ten years, at the average rate of 24 verses a day, and today it is an approved version. World War II provided some interruptions-especially when Knox became confessor to a group of evacuated teen-age girls billeted in the same house. But his sermons to them...
...nitpicker is "an incompetent supervisor who generally knows little or nothing about what he is reviewing, but feels that, in order to appear deserving of his position, he ought to criticize something." Having stated this definition. Author Leonard Drohan sets out to harpoon the nit of wit among civil servants and middleweight army brass at a Government bureau, a task about as difficult as shooting a whale in a swimming pool. But Drohan, who has worked in the U.S. civil service off and on since 1942, gets tangled in his unreeling novel and goes down with his quips. Spoofing government...
...Paar's gentle mockery was a replay of old summer material, e.g., his radio-announcer bloopers ("We have just the furniture to seat your nudes"), and reliable chestnuts like "Bring something round-we'll have a ball." But Paar's low-toned impudence and highhanded wit often came off engagingly. Reading off late news bulletins, he announced deadpan that Kathryn Murray, the indefatigable hostess of The Arthur Murray Party (TIME, July 22), "will not fight Floyd Patterson for the heavyweight championship of the world." He ribaldly admired the way Golfer Louise Suggs "drops her shorts on each...