Word: wits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Lautrec, professionalism and unsparing wit go hand in hand. He longed for professional recognition -- and got it, at last, from the implacable Edgar Degas, who in 1893 took a hard look at his work and pronounced, "Well, Lautrec, you're clearly one of us." Practically the only area of art he never worked in was sculpture; in the rest, he crossed boundaries with elegance and fluency, turning himself into the most inventive poster artist of his age in images that seem to bridge the epigrammatic world of the Japanese wood block and the declamatory, populist one of emerging mass media...
Tsongas's ad campaign reflects his low-key personal style -- minus his dry wit. To date, Tsongas is the only candidate in either party to abstain from ads blatantly attacking any of his rivals. But that may soon change: his media advisers are preparing a counteroffensive on the theory that in voters' minds unanswered charges amount to confessions...
...deserves. Barry Diller had that face by the time he was 30 and a fast-tracker at ABC. His premature baldness and stark visage gave him the look of an Edsel with the top down. And he already possessed that icy stare that made him, according to one Hollywood wit, "the last person you'd want to spill a drink on at a cocktail party." These, and a great gut for pop culture, served him well as chairman of Paramount Pictures from 1974 to '84, when it produced golden-calf movies (Grease, Flashdance) and cash-cow TV series (Taxi, Cheers...
There is something endearing about Tsongas' Letterman-esque humor although, admittedly, he works a harder at it than Letterman needs to and the wit is not at the same level...
...Landing on the Sun both humorous and sad, and thus the novel will neither surprise nor disappoint readers familiar with Frayn's most recent work, The Trick of It. Like most of his plays, novels, and screenplays, A Lnading on the Sun is a comic work of light, unassuming wit, tempered with the author's usual quiet sense of the prosaic tragedy of life. Frayn's greatest strength rests in his talent at reconciling humor and sadness, and he achieves this rapprochement in the book with gentle facility...