Word: wisecracking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...life itself, who has been brought in off the street to make a quorum for morning prayers. Except for an aged rabbi, even the elderly Jews who show up largely lack faith; they come out of habit or boredom, or as to a club where they can gossip and wisecrack and argue various isms. One of them brings his 18-year-old granddaughter, a schizophrenic who has been in and out of asylums and who, he thinks, is possessed of a dybbuk or evil spirit that must be exorcised. Amid prayer and prattle, amid the girl's infatuation...
...what it juxtaposes and contrasts-chant and wisecrack, surrealism and photography, insanity and farce, demonology and Freud-The Tenth Man is telling and sharp. And Playwright Chayefsky has an equally good ear for the colloquial speech of his Jews as for their dialectical pomposities. But in spattering its theatrical vignettes with philosophic question marks, The Tenth Man takes on obligations it does not meet. Far from turning fantasy into vision, it fails to save it from sentimentality. Not only are all the play's characters uniformly nice, but exorcism seems a convenient miracle drug, and the happily vanishing young...
...Berliner's password is "Mir kann keener"-"Nobody can put anything over on me"-and his instinctive reaction to totalitarianism, as it is to anything highfalutin, is a deflating wisecrack. The airlift memorial at which last week's anniversary ceremonies began is universally known to Berliners as "the Hunger Claw"; a modernistic postwar church that looks as though a train might pull into it at any moment is called "Jesus Station." When Berliners use the high-flown expressions coined to describe their city's cold-war role-"the beacon of freedom" or "the show window of democracy...
...This Slanderer." Compared to Morse's 20,000-word tirade, Clare Luce's 22-word wisecrack was a pebble slingshot against a ton of brickbats. But it stung Wayne Morse. As soon as the Senate wound up its close REA vote (see The Congress), Morse stood up. Not so soon, said Morse, "did I expect that those of us who voted against the nomination of Clare Boothe Luce would be proved so right." He read off her horse-kick comment, argued that it showed he was right all along about the "emotional instability on the part of this...
This is a first novel about a small New York businessman that blends folk humor with wisecrack as if Sam Levenson had had his jokes edited by George S. Kaufman. Hero Bill Roth, 23, is an ex-G.I. working for his engineering degree who lives with his parents in The Bronx. He sleeps on a sofa couch in the living room "on the main trade route from the bedroom to the bathroom." When he stays out late with girls or comes home with liquor on his breath, he is treated to his mother's virtuoso sighs...