Word: wolcott
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Benchley was associated with the New Yorker, and as MacDonald points out, so also were nearly all the good parodists of this century: Peter de Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, and E. B. White. Their victims' language is pleasantly familiar, and for that modern parodies seem the funniest. One probably has to be a kind of literary snob to appreciate parody anyway, and although we are often told solemnly that parody must be funny in itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash...
...Wolcott Gibbs is a conspicuously less exciting parodist, and some of his work is too crude to observe anything but the most superficial aspects of his subjects; yet he does well enough with J. P. Marquand. "Outside my window the river lay opalescent in the twilight, but for a moment I saw it as a dark and relentless torrent bearing me on into the unknowable future, and I shuddered," is not remarkable for its wit, but the next sentence--"I didn't want to get married; I just wanted to go back to Harvard"--excuses the rest. I like...
...late Victorian period (C. S. Calverley, Lear and J. K. Stephen), based on a common Oxbridge education. In this century Macdonald loyally finds U.S. parodists better than Britain's best (Belloc, Chesterton, Beerbohm, Connolly notwithstanding), and the best of these in The New Yorker school (E. B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, Peter De Vries). The reason: that magazine, with its "peculiar combination of sophistication and provinciality," provides the necessary "compact cultural group." "The old lady from Dubuque," it seems, now digs Jack Kerouac...
Died. Major General (ret.) Charles Wolcott ("Doc") Ryder, 68, much-decorated Army hero of both world wars, who in 1942 commanded the Allied invasion force that hit eastern Algeria and proceeded to mop up the entire country within 76 hours (while he and Envoy Robert Murphy negotiated the end of French resistance with Vichy's Admiral Jean Darlan in Algiers); of a heart attack; in Vineyard Haven, Mass...
...would be served by naming names. The one aspect of the show that is worthy of praise is the fine set designed by Stephan Palestrant. He alone seems to have any idea of the style and lightness required for the staging of a dated farce. In fact, to paraphrase Wolcott Gibbs, Mr. Palestrant's sets were delightful, it's a shame that all those people kept walking in front of them...