Word: witting
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BAREFOOT IN THE PARK should probably insure its audiences with Lloyd's of London, just in case anyone dies laughing. Playwright Neil Simon's unpredictable wit, Mike Nichols' spry direction, and Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley's comic finesse as a pair of blissfully wacky newlyweds provide incessant merriment...
...style was a tough wit. When he met Nikita Khrushchev for the first time in Vienna in 1961, he noticed a medal on the Russian's chest, asked what it was. When Khrushchev replied that it symbolized the Lenin Peace Prize, Kennedy snapped back: "I hope you keep it." Again, when he spoke at a big-money fund-raising dinner in Denver, he looked over the audience for a moment, then cracked: "I am touched by your attendance-but, of course, not as deeply touched as you were...
Oiling the Hinges. Ever since the first cave man sealed a tribal alliance over a haunch of charred flesh and a gourdful of fermented juice, such working sessions have been as much a part of diplomacy as the formal conference. Thanks largely to his wit and disarming manner at parties, Benjamin Franklin coaxed 55 million livres out of a nearly bankrupt French government during American Revolution. Bound for the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand told King Louis XVIII, "Sire, I have more need of casseroles than of written instructions," and his success in softening the terms imposed on his defeated nation...
...been twelve years since I last spoke in this House," he began.* In the next few minutes it became all too plain that the cozier, clubbish style of the House of Lords had blunted Douglas-Home's debating thrust, and his supporters missed his usual pungent wit. After a long, meandering preamble, he launched into a lackluster exposition of ambitious government policies for the coming year. "The formula," said he flatly, "is growth without inflation, and the method, acceleration from positions previously prepared." Groaned one Conservative: "God, it's like a Tory election poster!" Twice Sir Alec even...
...Keaton, Langdon Fields-lightened their essays on human folly with the inspired lunacy that makes art. Kramer offers the harshly realistic image of greed itself, and simply tops it off with wisecracks. His cast cannot match the physical style of Mack Sennett, and Mad World's substitute for wit is the flaccid humor of insult. In dozens of roadside hassles, Ethel Merman as Berle's nerve-shattering mother-in-law begins almost every sentence with "Shuddup, you big stupid idiot...