Word: formula
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Marxian formula is simple, scriptless, and enormously successful. Each couple of contestants (three for each half-hour show) is given $20 and a chance to bet on their answers to questions in a given field. Quizmaster Groucho perches on a stool by the microphone, and chats with them between questions. He encourages them to tell their life stories, and as they talk, he festoons the impromptu dialogue with strings of rapid-fire gags, or simply guides his victims into verbal traps and lets them writhe. "Women are the best ones on this program," says Marx, carefully flicking cigar ashes...
...Million" is an early attempt at the formula that later proved successful in "Tales of Manhattan." A dying millionaire decides to give away his money--in million-dollar gobs--to people selected at random from the city directory. He does this to avoid leaving it to his relatives, who are gathered in the hallway like homing turkey buzzards. The point of it all is that Good People can be happy with money, but that Bad People cannot, and so on, through half a dozen incidents...
...fruit & vegetables will get some of his bounty-the bill set aside approximately $100 million a year from custom revenues so that truck farmers could get in on the grab. ^ Farmers had long expressed dissatisfaction with the old parity 1909-14 base period. The bill provided a new parity formula, based on a time of even greater farm prosperity-the past ten years. To make this even more attractive, the concocters provided that federal wartime subsidies (paid to keep consumer prices below OPA ceilings) should also be tossed in the weighing pan, together with the cost of hired farm labor...
...find two pleasant new ways of ribbing Hollywood: once in a studio scene where a trained gorilla seems, by comparison with the leading lady, a mental Einstein; and once when three stars who proved box-office as slatterns (Olivia de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Wyman) chant their triumphal formula: Be a mess, be a mess, be a mess! And not many revues can offer two full-length parodies that hit at least as many right notes as wrong ones: a musical-comedy Hamlet (with Dick Sykes), which has the good sense to swipe its music, and a Streetcar-like, Salesman...
...Dunster single-wing couldn't find the right formula, and Eliot coasted to the win, the game ending with the ball deep in Funster territory. Jack Simpson, Dunster linesman, playing an excellent defensive game, was hurt in the off-tackle slant that was the next-to-last play of the contest. Simpson's injury was not serious, but he will spend the night in Stillman Infirmary...