Word: witting
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Hairspray certainly looks terrific. Scenery designer David Rockwell goes for wit and color (prettiest in pink) rather than bombast. A forest of microphones and klieg lights sprouts from the ceiling; disembodied heads appear, Laugh-In style, inside big-haired pictures that wiggle back and forth. If this is eye candy, dish out more...
...popular light verse, and if he dwelt in cellars, they were best-cellars. He wrote, he lectured, and he was not too arch or arty To appear as a panelist on TV's "Masquerade Party." He called himself not a poet but a "worsifier," But to me Nash was wit's November breeze or the funnyman of freon or the iceman comic or whatever suggests a synonym for coolness and the reversifier. There were other poets whom academe might choose to throw glory at, But Nash was our light-poet laureate. If you doubt that Nash is the perfect bedside...
...Allen he formed an informal group of sour-faced humorists who drawled cunning sarcasm So lacerating that anyone on the receiving end would collapse as if thrown down a Yellowstone National Park chasm. Without rising from behind the panel, they showed the world their rumps And defined the '50s wit as a fellow with a tone somewhere between gramps and grumps. Years later, as a movie critic I would sometimes be censured for a tendency to slander and slash, And I'd say, don't blame me, blame the insidious influence of television, or more specifically the Gang of Four...
...time I put Nash aside for Ernie Kovacs, Harvey Kurtzman, Lenny Bruce and the more aggressive comic geniuses of that decade, For I had determined that wit needed to explode, not simmer, and that a good joke was one so convulsively head-turning that it sent you to the hospital for swiveling-neck aid, And that it was harder to be funny than to be droll, as it is harder to create a joke than a platitude, Since a comedian requires ingenuity, while a humorist can coast on a querulous attitude. As the '50s ceded...
...Wit and Humor—Move over, James Engell. If I want to learn how to turn the oddities of everyday life into humor, I’m not going to place $35,000 in Harvard’s coffers. I’m just going to watch Seinfeld re-runs. My roommate and I would both agree that anyone who can turn black-and-white cookies and women with extra-large hands into comedy is a true genius...