Word: witting
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...Carney and Gleason, and Nichols's own broad way pair, the Odd Couple. All of these teams run on the same fuel--the big, ponderous straight-man who masterminds the operation always blowing up at the little dumb one, who muffs everything but stumbles on brilliant ideas through his wit. One's neat, one's messy. One's methodical, one's haphazard. It's all there in Oscar and Nicky, who could have synthesized everything that's funny in his paradigm if their relationship had been at all developed...
...Fortune as homage/satire about the vaudeville era, he forgot what Mel Brooks proved in Young Frankenstein: that the best way to poke fun at past cinematic formulas is still to take them seriously. He gave us buffoonery but it was a joke we didn't catch. The grimy, bourgeois wit of his earlier films was more perceptive and more easily shared...
Though Smith was a quiet scholar, he was scarcely bloodless. He comes fully alive in his writings as a skeptical observer of human nature, a staunch advocate of political as well as economic liberty, and now and then something of a deadpan Scottish wit. Much of The Wealth of Nations is unreadable today, but the browser comes across unexpected bits of phrasemaking-for example, the first description of England as "a nation of shopkeepers." It was no compliment; Smith complained that only such a nation could follow so mean-spirited a policy as Britain's colonial exploitation...
When a President gives good will, it is hard not to return it, as Democrat Strauss found out at a recent Gridiron dinner. Strauss got up and, as is the custom, deftly skewered the Republicans and verbally poked the President. Ford did not try to combat such wit with more wit. Instead, he turned and praised Strauss as a man of high purpose and ability, someone who could be President himself. Those around Strauss were sure they heard the Democrat muller, as he glowed in the tribute, "Why, the son of a bitch...
...Robin." Milne mentions his toe-curling horror at hearing classmates at boarding school play a record of Vespers on the Victrola: "Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! Christopher Robin is saying his prayers." Enchanted Places is eloquent about the joys of countryside, the felicities of light verse. Milne writes with wit and humane perception about his later relationship with his father. In a space hardly larger than a Pooh book, he has, in fact, unobtrusively condensed a mini-memoir, a portrait of A.A. Milne, a bittersweet study of a literary celebrity in the '20s and something very like an annotated...