Word: witting
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Slightly taller than a shotgun and blessed with an acidulous nonstop wit, Brooks, 41, was one of the most inventive writers on Sid Caesar's old Show of Shows. Brooks turned performer himself in 1960, when he and Carl Reiner created a free-form vaude ville routine about the 2,000-Year-Old Man. This character was a geriatric loser with a Yiddish accent who invented the wheel but made it square; someone else cropped off the corners and copped the fortune. Later he met Shakespeare ("What a pussycat he was; what a cute beard"). Typically, The Man invested...
Baker's wit only partially conceals an earnest preoccupation with the sad state of the U.S. as he sees it. Too much is synthetic and contrived, he insists, from the current sterile search for the "real self" to the bloodless, painless violence that saturates TV. Everything is produced to be consumed and discarded, and he puts his column in the same category. "There is something sneaky about us," he writes, proving once again that the best humorists are often arch-pessimists. "It is almost as if we were determined to come and go without leaving a footprint...
Despite its lack of death-defying wit, Exit the King is not unmoving as it records the tender anguish of love for what one is about to lose. Berenger's question, "Why was I born if it wasn't forever?" is a lacerated cry from the heart. Sadly, the bumbling hand of the APA reduces it to an infantile yelp of self-pity...
...Shaw's plays have taken his death badly. The scenes creak at the joints. The wit sputters more often than it fizzes. The characters seem alive from the neck up only. St. Joan has not been spared. In a conscientious but lethargic revival at Manhattan's Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, the play drones on like a college seminar labeled "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Nationalism, 1412-1431." In the title role, Diana Sands is earth-bound but never God-intoxicated, more of a common scold than an uncommon saint...
...home. Miss Stead also fences with the discontents and ambiguities of big-city life. In one story, an alcoholic who has buckled under urban pressure "longs for the simple rest of a child or a woman or a dog." Yet he knows that "a man wants more, much more." Wit, satire, views on social, moral and intellectual history -the author offers them with a refinement and subtlety that provide fresh insights into the daily experiences most people share...