Word: gagged
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Three of Joe Miller's* most successful radio debtors publicly acknowledged their debt last week. They gave a party (lavishly attended by comics) at a Manhattan hotel in honor of the immortal card. One gag man telegraphed regrets: "Where would radio be without...
...vaudeville is the key to Hope, even though he has recently had the lock changed. He is first & foremost a gag man, with a gag man's brash ability to keep moving, ad-lib, hit back; above all, with a gag man's sense of timing. Says Hope: "I was born with timing and coordination." Artistically he was born with little else-no special trick of speech, gift of pantomime, sense of character. Quite inartistically, indeed, he was born with a kind of strenuous averageness-which paradoxically managed to set him apart...
...With gags alone, no matter how expertly fired, no comic can hit even a gag-loving nation between the eyes. Gags are too brassy, fleeting, unvisual. The true clown or jester tops the gag man by being both a richly eccentric character and a vividly expressive type-Chaplin is The Little Man, Durante The Wild Man, Ed Wynn The Perfect Fool. Hope has no eccentric character; but by giving his gags dramatic value he made himself a type-the dumb wise guy, the quaking braggart, the lavish tightwad. But this type somehow dissolves into a far broader and more significant...
...double-talking ex-basketball great, did himself proud at both the smoker and afterwards in Harvard Square where he occupied himself asking gendarmes where he could find the quanta obit-blah-blah-blah--and if it wasn't close by? The bobbies were befuddled no end. Anything for a gag...
Mayor Riley is probably typical enough. He used to sell tires, found politics more fun, was elected mayor in 1940. He wears sailor straws ("boaters" in Britain), flashy double-breasted suits, a red-rosebud and an American Legion pin in his lapel. He likes clambakes, gag pictures and calling people by their first names. As mayor he is noisy, hard-working and efficient, should be a gaudy contrast to the traditional English mayor who should be efficient, hard-working but definitely not noisy...