Word: witting
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...Jerard Hartman's comedy script is not funny. The idea, an unwary dupe being pushed into campaigning for clean politics, may not be entirely unsullied by past uses, but settling on a fortune teller's haunt as his headquarters does much to brighten the theme. Situation cannot substitute for wit unfortunately, and Hartman seems to have felt his duties over upon conception...
...opaque--that Archibald has fashioned his play. He might better have interpolated passages in which James lights his characters as he seldom does through their words. On such passages the reader relies above all in regard to the "frail vessel" of James' heroine. Without assurances of Isabel's wit and sensitivity, he could find no tragedy in the end of her independence--her longing to embrace life and soar on her imagination--in the prison of a marriage based on hatred and convention. The Isabel of her words alone seems only the Isabel with whom James began, "the mere slim...
Wearing Cecil Beaton's bright costumes, traversing a brilliant Beaton drawing-room, the Lunts play Quadrille to the hilt. The only trouble is that there is no blade. The play's light volleys of wit come from a Coward who only plays doubles and no longer will go to the net; from a Coward who has written more like some fondly reminiscing oldster than a mocking enfant terrible-and with an oldster's fearful garrulousness. But however unthinkable Quadrille would be without the Lunts, with them Coward's very mildness is not altogether unwelcome...
...19th century French wit once remarked that there were only two monarchs in the world whose thrones he envied. One was Czar Nicholas, absolute autocrat of 120 million Russians; the other was the Prince of Monaco, who knew most of his subjects by name. Russia's Czar is no more, and the 20th century has whittled down the list of Europe's monarchs to an inconspicuous handful, but in the tiny (half-mile square) principality of Monaco, which huddles precariously between the mountains and the sea on France's Riviera, the Genoese Grimaldi dynasty still rules...
...From there, however, the issue trails into a succession of three attempts at movie satire. The attempts satirize only themselves. The other prose rises above this level but once. Fletcher's The Ghost is somewhat ill-conceived, but nonetheless well-executed, and his style precurses a Renaissance in 'Poon wit. Any such revival, however, is stifled by the inclusion of a piece titled As Maine Goes. Evidently the editors realized that it was poor and attempted to discourage readers with a first sentence beginning: "To the average Harvard undergraduate buried beneath his books at Widener...