Word: woollcott
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ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT, the broadest wit of the twentieth century, returns to abuse and tickle the audience of Howard Teichmann's elegant one man show, Smart Aleck. Peter Boyden brings a lighthearted grace to the stage as the New York Times critic and founder of the Algonquin Round table. He evokes the theater and manners of the twenties and thirties with anecdotes and witticisms and carries off Woollcott's bitchy sexlessness with impeccable style. Introducing himself as "Alexander Woollcott, an American Original," Boyden launches into an amusing biography spiced with puns and literary anecdotes...
Alexander Woollcott, critic, lecturer, radio raconteur, died in 1943 but he has never passed away. The reason is that his friends Kaufman and Hart renamed him Sheridan Whiteside and painted an indelible portrait of him in his primary colors-venom, egocentricity and gush. Ever since this farce-comedy opened in 1939, it has induced fits of manic laughter...
...Columnist Alexander Woollcott called Herman Mankiewicz the funniest man in New York, a town that then included Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker and other luminaries of the Algonquin Round Table. As a screenwriter in the Hollywood of the '30s and '40s, "Mank" continued to shoot from the quip. Dining at the home of a pretentious gourmet, he suddenly rushed to the bathroom. "Don't worry," he assured his host later, "the white wine came up with the fish." When movie attendance dropped, he offered a unique solution: "Show the movies in the streets, and drive...
...and/or attractive, in which sophistication and style-above all, style-mattered more than life itself. In one sense it was a constricted world; the old New Yorker never boasted more than 330,000 subscribers. In another sense, that world seemed to have no boundaries. It played host to Alexander Woollcott, Parker and Robert Benchley, and published the poems and short stories of almost every writer worth a second look. Such diversity should imply a 50-year-old scrapbook, an omnium-gatherum without standards or values. The literate world knows better. The very term "New Yorker piece" connotes scruple and concern...
...decidedly not. A seasoned New Yorker writer can make even New Yorker writers interesting. Besides, from the beginning, Ross's humor magazine attracted remarkable talents: Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, S.J. Perelman, John O'Hara, Edmund Wilson, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, George Price. The list can (and in Gill's telling does...