Word: wits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...like a very large red pear that the ants have been at. Fred Allen has other gifts as well. John Steinbeck considers him "unquestionably the best humorist of our time ... a brilliant critic of manners and morals." Jack Benny, his private friend and public enemy, calls him "the best wit, the best extemporaneous comedian I know." Edgar Bergen, a very thoughtful fellow among professional comics, dogmatically says that Fred is "the greatest living comedian . . . a wise materialist who exposes and ridicules the pretensions of his times...
...descends, like a black hole, to the bottom of his brain. It allows the very basis of his thinking a cold, immediate access to the facts of living. Certainly few entertainers are so comfortlessly close to reality as Allen; still fewer are crowded so hard by sanity. Often his wit appears to be a cushion against hard fact. More often it seems an act of reprisal. He hurls it, rich with cyanic rancors, in the face of sham wherever he sees it. Of a male celebrity who strode into church one midwinter morning wearing sun glasses, Allen grated...
MacVeagh shared the Greek Government's exile after the Nazi conquest and (promoted to ambassador) shared in its tragic return. His reports, once prized for their wit, have recently been soberly serious. A philosophic democrat, MacVeagh has seen Greece, which gave the word democracy to the world, sick from within and under assault from without. To cure the inward sickness, MacVeagh holds emphatically, in his quiet voice and brilliantly phrased dispatches, that the U.S. must move in and virtually run the country to make its aid effective. Yet, with Byron, he has "dreamed that Greece might still be free...
...blow the lid off the Teapot Dome scandal), would test the talents of a Boswell. It is Grandfather (Uncle Henry) Wallace who steals the show. First a rebellious Presbyterian minister, later a farmer and outspoken farm-paper editor, Uncle Henry passed on his name but none of his sharp wit and little of his peppery common sense and talent for writing...
Suddenly It's Spring presents its morally dubious entertainment so deftly and with such frequent stabs of insight and spanglings of cynical wit that the show as a whole is passably amusing...