Word: wittedly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...screwball wit of S. J. Perelman strangely enough fails to make this wacky plot rock his audience back on their seats with the clanky shock of his offstage writings. The play's isolated episodes, bald-faced gags, screwy curtains are sometimes hilarious, but they fail to bind together into effective farce...
...prolific was Bangs that the number of his pseudonyms put a strain on his wit. They included Shakespeare Jones, Gaston V. Drake, Periwinkle Podmore, Horace Dodd Gastit, A. Sufferan Mann. In politics he was defeated for Mayor of Yonkers, but became a very useful bird dog for the imperialism of Roosevelt I and General Leonard Wood in Cuba (on which he wrote a book) and in the Philippines. Had Wood been nominated in 1920, Bangs would probably have gone to the Court of St. James's. In the reconstruction of France he more or less worked himself to death...
...Francis Hyde Bang's biography is a rather docile portrait of a personable, energetic, businessman-of-letters making good through capitalizing a bottomless facility for thin wit. It also evokes a rather sterile era in U.S. cultural history. The merry dinners of Bangs and his circle still echo bloodlessly in Manhattan's Century Club, and their humor, which used to roll the genteel families of this continent in the aisles, still lives palely in a few faculty-censored class annals. Today it seems hard to believe that a whole generation could laugh at both Bangs and Mark Twain...
...radio last Sunday, a U. S. composer poked mild fun at a friend. The fun was some low viola chitchat in a string orchestra: a musical impression of the almost inaudible wit of Musicritic Robert A. Simon of The New Yorker. It was performed by special dispensation, the work of the first ASCAP man to return to the networks with his own tunes. The composer and conductor was lanky, ruddy, silvery-haired Robert Russell Bennett, back on the air in a WOR-Mutual program called Russell Bennett's Notebook (7 p.m. E. S. T.). The program has been allowed...
...deals, of course, with a husband's attempts to bring his marriage to its logical conclusion, and culminates in his final success after long and arduous tribulations. In "This Thing Called Love" the same theme was handled with wit and if not subtlety, at least a certain adult touch. But in this picture the heavy, sloppy traces of poor direction and casting and even photography can be felt time and again. In addition to this the dialogue is as poor as anything that has come out of Hollywood for quite a while. There are about two actually funny remarks...