Word: witnesses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...toward the theatre is a deeply serious one. In a profession populated largely by somnambulistic hacks, his Shavian emphasis on the relation of drama to life is rare and valuable. But his seriousness never declines into solemnity; his awareness of the social significance of the stage is leavened by wit (he is a punster as well as a pundit), and by an understanding that dramatic criticism, is not merely a department of literary criticism, but something unique: an attempt "to give a permanent form to something impermanent. That," he says, "was certainly the impulse that pushed me into dramatic criticism...
...golden age of comedy. The high points may have been classic, the conventions legendary, the faces immortal, but even these excerpts show an astonishing puerility and lack of invention. The only nostalgic portion for the younger generation is the appearance of Will Rogers, who is able to bring wit even into the silent film...
Mary Graydon's mother conveys all the wit and essential fatigue of this intelligently vague woman who could only manage to be Christian in one direction at a time. Her brood--the handsome Humphrey (Joel Crothers) and the over-eager Nicholas (Paul Ronder)--are more than adequately rakish and frenetically inept, respectively; and to say this family gathering seems unusual would be extreme understatement...
...audacity with grim efficiency. Parliamentarians denounced him as an ingrate; Royalists hailed him as ingenious, and his white dog was popularly ranked "Sergeant-Major-General Boy." Thus the Cavaliers held until the war's end a virtual monopoly of high spirits and colorful loyalty, plus resources of wit, satire and song...
...think-shop," a sort of Rube Goldberg of the intellect with his head in the clouds of the title; and his students stoop over so their brains can look for profundities while their arses master star-gazing. The playwright achieved a special mixture of satire, criticism, obscenity, invective, wit, fantasy, and lyricism-all within a set of conventions as rigid and complex as those of the 18th-century opera buffa...