Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...virile, breezy, and charged with a lusty bravura, whether he was splashing through a Technicolor rainstorm, kicking up his heels beneath the Eiffel Tower, or skittering across Manhattan stoops in his Navy whites. Though his singing voice sounded like someone gargling pebbles, he projected an easy grace and wit that made him the most sought-after song-and-dance man in Hollywood...
...Sandburg, the head of the family was Abraham Lincoln, who embodied the qualities that the poet so greatly admired, and in some measure possessed: honesty, wit, an unpretentious and even awkward eloquence. For 15 years, Sandburg labored on his monumental six-volume biography of Lincoln. He won a Pulitzer prize for the Lincoln books in 1940, another for his Collected Poems...
...higher than among $9,000 families. In the middle class, violence is perhaps sublimated increasingly in sport or other pursuits. Says Sociologist Wolfgang: "The gun and fist have been substantially replaced by financial ability, by the capacity to manipulate others in complex organizations, and by intellectual talent. The thoughtful wit, the easy verbalizer, even the striving musician and artist are equivalents of male assertiveness, where broad shoulders and fighting fists were once the major symbols...
...another thing about every chestnut: for one reason or another it is dearly loved and long performed. The reason for The Lady's long and happy life is its language. Christpoher Fry has a Chinanman's fascination for high-meaning word plays, mixed with an Irishman's compulsive wit. He cannot bear to write a line, for even the lowliest of characters, which is not pure honey. The flow of mellifluous banter carries the play along, and on it floats truth after home truth. Few writers and fewer playwrights can mix colloquial expressions with genuine poetry as smoothly...
Aristotle said that a play should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This one has two out of three. Peace begins with brilliant scatology--and brilliant scatology is far more difficult to create than brilliant wit. It ends, in a breath-taking 20-minute sora, with stirring satire--and satire that stirs you is the rarest and most wonderful kind. But the middle, oh the middle, is what they tell me Hasty Pudding shows are like, and second-rate Pudding shows at that. You can say that bad and irrelevant jokes are genuine Aristophanes, but that excuse comes...