Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...objectivity." Reporters "divest news of its own inherent drama. They cast away the succulent flesh and offer the reader dry bones, coated with an insipid sauce of superfluous verbiage. They reject the flashing, illuminating phrase, which can make an unknown foreign statesman come vividly alive, or a dash of wit which may relieve the tedium unavoidably contained in much important news...
BLACK COMEDY is a slam-bang comedy-literally. The humor of Peter Shaffer's one-acter springs more from body English than feats of wit. It is based on a single conceit -agile actors in a blaze of lights behave and misbehave, bump and reel, as if in total darkness...
...SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE, by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. Novelist Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) has pulled Joyce's astronomical Dublin masterpiece into the general reader's field of vision simply by cutting out two-thirds of it. There is still plenty of wit and wordplay left...
...with the composer who has inspired some of his finest ballets, Igor Stravinsky. For Stravinsky's spare, syncopated Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, Balanchine created lively, Broadway-flavored footwork. In the hot atmosphere of scarlet costumes and lighting, his dancers bobbed, swiveled and stretched in patterns of perky wit and sexy grace. Patricia Neary clowned elegantly, and Edward Villella and Patricia McBride drew cheers for the jazz joie de vivre with which they bounded through their intricate roles...
...Earl Russell, now 94, presents a psychological conundrum of a similar order. Renowned mathematician, logician, philosopher and Nobel prizewinner, he writes English with all the precision and lucidity of which the language is capable. Yet for all its clarity and wit, the first volume, instantly acclaimed in England as a classic, leaves unresolved problems of character. To some, he is a crypto-mystic, to others, a heartless brain. Most recently he has become an excessively emotional organizer of peace marches who mouths anti-American propaganda drivel...