Word: jokesmith
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...jokesmith of his day is a six-foot gag-&-stunt machine named Milton Berle (rhymes with churl). His 38-year-old brain is a tight-packed file of some 50,000 jokes and japes. With never-miss efficiency, Berle can dip into these mental files, yank out just the gag he wants when he wants it. The "Thief of Badgags" (as spiteful rivals call him), who has probably lured more people into nightclubs than any performer alive, is now making his sixth attempt in 18 years to lure listeners to their radios with a Berle show...
...Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines had just closed down nine months ago when the War Assets Administration began to get tongue-in-cheek bids for them. One jokesmith wanted the lines for piping grapefruit juice from Texas to New York. Another thought tough Texas jackrabbits could be profitably run to eastern markets since "anything becomes a delicacy if it is moved far enough." Even harried WAA officials took time out to join in the fun. Their proposal: start carbonated water through the pipes in Texas, spike it with bourbon in Kentucky, route the piped highballs through the "ice mines...
...Jokesmith's Art. In the training classes, mines and traps are mixed with a practical joker's devilish wit. Students quickly learn to be suspicious as the giant firecrackers explode when a truck is started, or a tool lifted. Students cannot be too suspicious for their own future good...
...curtain, as though they were signboards in his landscape. Within a year he, his father and brother had sold one of the curtains to nearly every music hall in California, set out to cover the U. S. Presently, Lee Lash and his horrible drop curtains were something every jokesmith in the U. S. had in his repertory...
Married. Sigourney Thayer of Manhattan, spasmodic theatrical producer, Wartime aviator, Atlantic Monthly poet, socially prominent jokesmith, son of Rev. William Greenough Thayer, headmaster of St. Mark's School, Southboro, Mass.; to Mrs. Emily Davies Vanderbilt of Manhattan, who last June, in six minutes, divorced William Henry Vanderbilt, son of the late Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt who perished on the Lusitania; in Manhattan. In 1921 Mr. Thayer was in Paris. It is related that he, poor, got to Europe by traveling steerage with a silk hat and no ticket...