Word: witting
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Lust for Work. Picasso's immense facility and control of gesture is still there; the wit, the Aristophanic irony, the ebullience and the capacity to fix an image remain. But he is apparently so infatuated with the spectacle of his own prodigious improvisation that, by one of the paradoxes that infest his life, he cannot focus it in any significant way. Picasso's reign over his images is such that no resistances are left-and that is his problem. Most of Picasso's variations on Velásquez's Las Meninas, Manet...
...character among his own creations. In passages that are almost unrelated asides, they have Max as drama critic quoting himself on plays, players and playgoers. These comments lack the pithy bite of aphorisms, and as out-of-context fragments, they lose much of the slyly inflected wit that is one of the special pleasures of reading Beerbohm. The tone is wrong too. Clive Revill employs a voice and manner of waspish arrogance, whereas benign scorn or amused disdain would be truer...
...ruled by chance. Some sequences click, and others clunk. Much dice-induced motivation is suspect. Luke might have left his wife and children without ever touching the dice. Even when the plot dawdles, Rhinehart's language and humor exert their wiles. Though he leans more to wisecrack than to wit, he gets off fine mimicrys of TV talk shows, journalistic deepthink and professorial psychoanalytic jargon. Between sheets (the book is copiously copulative), Rhinehart works up a positively Joycean lather-blather...
...anything, Electric Company wit may be a bit precocious for second-graders, since the head writer, Paul Dooley, is an alumnus of the satirical Second City theater troupe and one member of his staff has just arrived from the Dick Cavett Show. It is even now apparent that an appearance on Electric Company is going to be the chic guest gig of 1971-72, just as a cameo spot on Batman was the kick of the late '60s. Top comics like Mel Brooks, Bob and Ray, Tom Lehrer and Victor Borge have all signed up to do the show...
...does not outdo the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Ray Charles, Prokofiev, Orff, Richard Strauss or any other of the influences to be found in it. But it does fuse those elements into a new kind of thespic amalgam that has high dramatic point, melodic joy, and rarity of rarities, wit. Tim Rice's lyrics occasionally turn mundane in the otherwise commendable effort to speak in contemporary terms, but his psychologically aware variations on the Gospels are often adroitly arresting. Already beginning to doubt the steadfastness of his friends, Christ tells the Disciples at the Last Supper...