Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Greatest. His talent, in fact, is so elastic that he could probably make a living in any form of show business except midget-auto racing. From his start in vaudeville as a boy in Brooklyn, he developed his galloping wit in a string of tough nightclubs before becoming the Jack of all television. Now, as a serious actor and no longer merely a situation comedian, he is surrounded by competing actors schooled in the Method, but he holds his own with unquiet confidence, bellowing, as he always has: "I'm the world's greatest." Entering his new career...
Sail Away (Original Broadway Cast; Capitol). Noel Coward's strenuously hedonistic lines sound a little weary here, and his wit is Princeton Tiger '24 ("If you want to play strip poke /With the girls in cabin B/ Come to me, dear boys, come to me." But in a couple of songs (Where Shall I Find Him?, Later than Spring) Elaine Stritch whoops it up as if she were really riding a winner...
...offered the post of Foreign Minister after the recent German elections. He refused on the grounds that his talents were economic. But when asked if he rules out all political jobs-say, the Economics Ministry if Erhard should succeed Adenauer as Chancellor-Abs abandons his usual mocking wit. Says he: "Circumstances can arise in which no one can refuse to accept such responsibility...
John Kulli's direction of the Lowell House production has shrewdly encouraged the play's most endearing virtues--its consistently high level of wit and the fundamental ingenuity of a plot that covers the historical epoch of man twice. Tom Segall as Nathan is a ludicrously, wonderfully pathetic God; Art Roberts (Rex Regis) is indistinguishable from a thousand harried executives. Plantagenet himself (Jere Whiting) seems determined to squeeze the juice from his lines; perpetually overcome by the cleverness of the dialogue he forgets that his significance lies not in his pose but in his machine. The grey hireling...
WHAT'S GOT YOUR BACK UP? by Bill Mouldin (146 pp.; Harper; $3.95). Herblock is clearly Mauldin's master and Daumier his god; this collection of his work proves that he has edged past the one and is moving determinedly, in quality of line and force of wit, toward the other. The best cartoon book of the season...