Word: wits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bravo! would seem like apt material for a neat Ferber & Kaufman blend of oil & vinegar. The play does have touches of warmth and wit, but most of it is a purely mechanical sponging of the emotions, or a frantic clutching at comic and dramatic straws. The characters are too often mere plushy stage furniture, exploited rather than explored. Only Refugee Actress Darvas (wife of famed Hungarian Playwright Ferenc Molnar) possesses real rather than synthetic dignity and charm...
Lacking Maldarelli's subtlety in sculpture, Mitzi makes up for it in wit, a wealth of ideas, and a willingness to be laughed at even when she is dead-earnest. The hit of her show was a model for a 114-ft. Family of Man Totem that she thought would look well in front of the U.N. building. ("People told me I was a fool to try it, but I said if I wanted to be diplomatic I wouldn't be a sculptor.") Among the most entertaining exhibits was a bulbous Woman-Shaped Vessel seated in a bird...
...Dramatic Club commented that a person like this differs from the "critics who can't distinguish wit and sophistication from vulgarity...
George Meredith was the Evelyn Waugh of the Victorians. He was wondrously clever, with a wit that snapped and crackled and never faltered through more than 20 novels. "His pages so teem with fine sayings and magniloquent epigrams, gorgeous images, and fantastic locutions," said Critic W. E. Henley, that "the mind would welcome a little dullness as a glad relief." Had he had the virtue of simplicity, in addition to his other talents, he might have been to English fiction what Shakespeare is to its poetry and drama...
...undecided, and somebody else said that he had to vote for Thurmond because Eiscuhower isn't running. And that winds up the poll's comic output, except that I forgot to say that Calvin Coolidge also got a vote, and just in case even this master stroke of wit leaves you glum, it at least should remind you that when Dorothy Parker heard that Coolidge had died, she asked "How can they tell...