Word: wits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...eighteen years long-haired, bespectacled vaudevillian Ichimatsu Ishida has been convulsing the Japs with his sharp, satirical songs on the contemporary scene. A score of times his tuneful wit (needling Tojo for wordy communiques, the Zaibatsu for war profiteering in Manchuria, etc.) has landed him in jail. Last month it Landed him in Japan's new Diet, as the head of his own one-candidate Japan Fair Argument Party. Last week a song got him in trouble again...
Actor Richardson's Falstaff was very likely the best that this generation had seen. It caught the lustiness as well as the wit. Falstaff was indeed "that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts" in the chambers of whose brain, as Hazlitt quoted, "it snows of meat and drink." Whether playing dead or playing the hero, making light of honor or rhapsodizing about sack, impersonating the King or embracing blowzy Doll Tearsheet (amusingly played by Joyce Redman), he rolled through the play, the greatest comic figure in English literature...
...Wayward Wit. Six years ago loquacious Jimmy was hauled into New York's Supreme Court, charged with libeling a state boxing commissioner. In a burst of silence, he heard Justice John McGeehan sum up his attributes: "One sees the rakish leer in his eye and gathers that he has a wayward wit. . . . He is engaged in a business that is mostly ballyhoo." Few people remember that the man in the iron hat managed five world champions...
Shaw & Larkin. One day a friend told him about Bernard Shaw: "the cleverest Irishman the world knows, Sean. A wit of wonder. A godsend to men who try to think." Another day he listened to Jim Larkin talk at Liberty Hall in Dublin-about the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, the "red flag rather than the green banner...
...British soldiers. "Th' wild Irish," said a soldier then; "drink goes to their 'eads. Wot was bitin' em? Barmy, th' lot of 'em. Wot did they do it for? Larfable." "Poor, dear, dead men," says O'Casey now, "poor W. B. Yeats." The wit and rich lingo of Juno and the Paycock, the legendary and the tragic, real Ireland of The Plough and the Stars, run through his pages like the River Liffey through Dublin...