#ma

He was white and shaken, like a dry martini. ↗

— P. G. Wodehouse

#like #martini #shaken #white

A typical 'Larry King Live' is a pastiche whose absurdism defies parody. Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he's strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject. ↗

— James Wolcott

#chair #defies #his #king #larry

After a decade this glum, we deserved a shot of 'Glee,' a show that restored our faith in the power of song, the beauty of dance, and the magic of 'spirit fingers' to chase our cares and woes into somebody else's backyard. ↗

— James Wolcott

#backyard #beauty #cares #chase #dance

And what could be a hotter ticket than the improbable triumph of 'The Book of Mormon,' the musical-comedy moon shot of the season? Its creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, of Comedy Central's 'South Park,' are the most unlikely Rodgers and Hammerstein team ever to bowl a thundering strike. ↗

— James Wolcott

#bowl #central #comedy #could #creators

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized. ↗

— James Wolcott

#become #been #design #iconography #like

Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through. ↗

— James Wolcott

#broadway #deplore #imaginative #influx #machine

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective. ↗

— James Wolcott

#comedy #defective #episodic #explain #factory

I try to avoid Politico to spare myself psoriasis of the brain but so many journalists cite it that I'm forced to be aware of it no matter how big a moat I build. ↗

— James Wolcott

#aware #big #brain #build #cite

In 2008, Barack Obama did get Democrats hyperventilating, whipped up to a creamy froth, while John McCain creaked ahead like a cranky granddad whom Republicans let move to the front of the buffet line, deferring to seniority, as they had in 1996, when Bob Dole turtled to the top of the ticket. ↗

— James Wolcott

#barack #barack obama #bob #buffet #cranky

It isn't that NPR is matriarchal but that it has dedicated itself to not being patriarchal in its outlook and presentation, stipulating from the outset that its headline voices would not resound across the fruited plains from big male bags of air sent from Mount Olympus. ↗

— James Wolcott

#air #bags #being #big #dedicated