Word: witting
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...like everyone, has a personality, if not strong personal opinions, and a rich inner life, which he was able to keep to himself until last Monday. Friends describe him as a combination of the intellectual, scholarly, never married Justice Benjamin Cardozo and a tightfisted solitary cleric. In looks and wit, he resembles comedian Pat Paulsen; in his 5 o'clock shadow, Richard Nixon. He favors well-worn suits (black robes are said to add color to his wardrobe), cheap cars (a 1987 Volkswagen), non-power lunches (cottage cheese and an apple) and classical music. His main indulgence...
...surprisingly deadpan humor that doubles as comic relief in the movie's otherwise heavy atmosphere. Discounting as evidence a facetious admittal of the crime--Sabich's "Yeah, you're right"--Lyttle says, "If Mr. Sabich had come from my part of town, he'd have said, 'Yo mama.'" The wit, which is omnipresent with constant references to Della Guardia as "Mr. Dee Lay Guardia," add complexity to his character of an otherwise tough-nosed "Judge Motherfucker," as one ex-con who previously bribed him describes...
...more so than the content of Holzer's thoughts. Starting with Goethe, Pascal and Chamfort, the list of aphorists to whom she is inferior would be exceedingly long, but she does try. Not for nothing does she call her utterances "truisms." Their lack of wit is almost disarming. They have an earnest hortatory confidence that makes other kinds of word art -- Ben Vautier's in France in the '60s, for instance -- look semidetached. Holzer's trouble is that although she wants to use language alone as the stuff of visual art -- a dubious enterprise anyway -- she has no language...
...plague-ridden '80s. In the meantime he is working on a biography of Jean Genet and teaching courses on the French playwright and on creative writing at Brown University. Although his semiautobiographical coming-out themes are staples of gay fiction, White has transcended the genre with his wit, attention to sensuous detail and intensely explicit style. Stripping himself as bare as any writer in history, he writes with a passion that is meant to save his soul and those of his readers...
While Marshall and the film's writers have consciously drawn themes from Hitchcock, they are not above taking liberties with them, and provide Arachnophobia with welcome comic relief. Marshall's wit (he co-wrote Blazing Saddles) is evident in his direction of a series of suspense-ridden false alarms. He keeps the audience off-balance by allowing it at times to come away with a laugh when expecting another gruesome killing. A typical example is the shower scene, an obvious allusion to Psycho, which comes to a far more humourous conclusion than Hitchcock's version...