Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...comedy by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman entitled "The Man Who Came to Dinner" opened its two weeks engagement at the Plymouth last evening; the title sounds laborious, but the humor is uproarious, and the entertainment glorious. In short, the boys who wrote "You Can't Take It With You" have not lost their touch...
There is not much more to the plot, and the comedy arises more from well selected epithets and a number of choice expressions and apt phrases than from comedy of situation. This type of humor is bound to pall at times, and it does in this play in the third act. What might be called the "heart of gold scene" is not good, and the "denouncement" is worse, but in such a criticism one tends toward carping...
Though he has neither Lardner's indescribable humor nor Hemingway's Paris-found sense of style, John O'Hara ranks with them as a first-class, far from phoney reporter. Appointment in Samarra, his first and best novel, was good enough and true enough to make anything he wrote thereafter worth reading. Probably most worth reading are his acid short stories...
...this has been very negative. The study cards, "due or else"; the meetings in the Union, with their streams of advice and of traditional Harvard (professorial) humor; the coming attempts to draft Freshmen into various extra-curricular activities--these cannot be treated negatively by the men involved. Seriously speaking, then, the problem boils down--after the first, short-lived confusion--to this: how best can a balance be obtained between the academic and the social in a college career...
...Curry's darkly violent lithograph Line Storm "theatrical," Critic Craven supplied a pasture pastoral like Curry's bully Ajax. Others who sometimes wonder why Grant Wood indulges in such painstakingly stuffy satire as Honorary Degree (see cut) could admire his slick Seedtime and Harvest. Subtler was the humor of whimsical Doris Lee, who in her Winter in the Catskills successfully unrolled a cosmic panorama of mountain as a backdrop for a skater's spill...