Word: witting
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...allow things to get stuffy in an unfunny way. The rahther heavy English accents and the constant over-acting are initially acceptable, but as the play wears on the over-acting wears thin and the over-Oxbridge intonations make Coward's dry witticisms positively and Coward's eternally fresh wit is enough to sustain interest, but one almost wishes a kid from Brooklyn would wander in for a change of pace. Something more in the way of contrast is needed; Lisa Peers, as the straightforward cockney maid, comes close to fitting the bill...
...wit to vice and elegance to lust...
MALLON'S DISC-JOCKEY style of tour through his chosen diarists is amply anticipated by an introduction that rambles on (without any of that great Rambler Samuel Johnson's wit) about the progress of his own diary and his own rather banal generalizations about the practice of keeping a diary. Also included by way of introduction are generous quotations from his own diaries, such as a passage which he agrees is "pretty self-pitying stuff" written while Mallon lived near Harvard Yard and was "tired out from a semester of trying to learn Greek." It seems quite inappropriate that...
...picture. Trillin is a funny guy. He is a political Woody Allen, a populist at heart who sees foolishness teamed with greed and punctures the pomposities of that combination with more wit than any writer around today...
...however: his desire for incorporeality, that the "artist must manage to make believe that he never existed," is never quite achieved in any of his fiction and completely betrayed by his published correspondence. Flaubert's letters, in which profound statements on art and deeply personal confessions coexist with mordant wit and bloodcurdling obscenity, constitute as full a self-portrait of the artist as we are likely to get from any writer...