Word: boffo
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...Senate's slickest new comedy team is the improbable combination of Democratic Liberal Hubert Humphrey and Republican Conservative Barry Goldwater, who traded off quips for a boffo hour at a recent banquet of the Women's National Press Club. Humphrey's best line: "Barry's so handsome that I understand he's been offered a movie contract-with 18th Century-Fox." In turn, Goldwater compared Humphrey's druggist background with the academic luster of the new Cabinet appointments: "I can't see how the Denver College of Pharmacy jibes with Harvard...
...presidential jokes concerned majestic Abbott Lawrence Lowell, whose secretary once told a caller: "I'm sorry, sir. President Lowell has gone to Washington today, to call on Mr. Taft." With President Kennedy (Harvard '40) taking office this week, Washington has a whole new Harvard joke book-not boffo Broadway jokes, but subtle, like for the initiates...
Meanwhile, their private lives have not been as boffo as their shows. Lerner's list of wives reads almost like a history of plays on the road, and one of them points out that he plays a new part with each. Ruth Boyd (1940-47) was Social Register. Marion Bell (1947-49) was his Leading Lady, as she was in Brigadoon, and she came to the wedding with her music teacher. Actress Nancy Olson (1950-57) was the Upper-Middle-Class-All-Amer-ican-Girl (Lerner referred to her once as "the perfect wife"). Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo...
...survivors are headed by Little Mary Sunshine, a boffo operetta satirizing the Kern-y, Friml-ous past; The Balcony, Jean Genet's world view through a brothel window; The Connection, a pad full of hipsters seeking to prove that the opiate of the people is heroin after all; and a skillfully acted double bill of disenchantment: Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in which a beaten and lonely ex-writer poignantly and often amusingly grovels in his past, paired with Edward Albee's Zoo Story, in which a desperately lonely beatnik attempts the hopeless, tragicomic...
WHAT'S new is often related to what's old. This week, TIME'S editors find real news in the enduring works of a master who died in 1616 and is still the biggest box-office boffo of show business in summer...