By The Beachwood Droll Affairs Desk
Droll.
1. “Thomas Frank is a brainy, droll Kansas native who has his doubts about capitalism and conservative populism, and can infuriate both Democrats and Republicans.
– July 21, 2008
2. “But Flanagan’s review of Walters’ new memoir, Audition, is a superb, droll essay on a person ridiculed by the press elite who has ‘elicited more irreducible statements of self from more notable people than have all the giants of New Journalism.'”
– May 12, 2008
3. “July Esquire is excellent with a novella from Stephen King; a valiant Tom Junod attempt to offer a few insights on Angelina Jolie we’ve not read before; and a droll shot at competitor Vanity Fair with a page of mock covers of “Other Magazines Bono is Guest Editing This Month,” including Disney Adventures, Us Weekly, Cosmopolitan and Delta’s in-flight Sky (replete with “The Ten Most Egregious Sweatshops in Vietnam.”
– June 18, 2007
4. “Slate.com is worth a very droll video, Nino Scalia IS Jack Bauer, with the online magazine’s cartoon imagining Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia starring as Bauer in 24 and starting his day threatening the life of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the frequent swing vote on the court these days, getting him to promise he will stop caring what liberals and the New York Times editorial page think of him.”
– October 15, 2007
5. “And the cover features maniacally droll Comedy Central show host Stephen Colbert sawing through an iPod and promoting his own contribution.”
– July 31, 2006
6. “In recent episodes of Gilmore Girls, the wonderfully droll favorite of teens and their moms on the WB Network, a coup d’tat at the Yale Daily News brought the firing of the tyrannical undergraduate editor.”
– June 2006
7. “June-July Details has a droll Jeff Wise opus on how he relented, learned the tricks of the trade and served as a male stripper for a day at a chum’s bachelorette party.”
– July 5, 2004
8. “Elsewhere, the issue draws laughs with very droll Christopher Buckley’s fictional tale on a Washington publicist who takes on a billionaire client whose aim is simple: elect an American pope.”
– March 24, 2003
9. “Columns that were ‘snappy and sharp and kind of droll and maybe a little bit cynical . . . were very often instantly perceived as unappealing, and didn’t have the sort of air of authority and neutrality which they tend to associate with Ann Landers’.”
– January 8 , 2003
10. “Sept. 3 Weekly Standard includes Andrew Ferguson’s stout and droll defense of President [Bush]’s apparently favorite book (judging by his quoting it all the time before schoolchildren), namely The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”
– Aug. 31, 2001
11. “In March 12 New Yorker, Adam Gopnik crafts a droll dissection of the weird New York gun possession trial of rap mogul Puff Daddy, which he finds ‘keeps returning, strangely but inexorably, to questions of tailoring.'”
– March 9, 2001
12. “Writer Hillary Johnson’s droll ‘Driving to the Boardroom’ opens with all the usual data about guys and golf, with one survey of Fortune 500 chief executive officers indicating that 98 percent described themselves as golfers.”
– May 26, 2000
13. “Ever engaging and droll, the 61-year-old ex-Republican stalwart made the following points during a session at a home whose small bar area features dandy behind-the-scenes photos of President Reagan and [Pat] Buchanan amid the breakup of the historic Reykjavik summit, and Reagan watching a replay of the Challenger explosion, both in 1986 (and both taken by current Tribune photographer Pete Souza, then the official White House snapper).”
– March 12, 2000
14. “If there were doubts, they are dispelled in the Nov. 10 issue of National Review, the increasingly snoozy bastion of right-leaning thought. It comes via droll Florence King’s critique of both the group and her fellow conservative columnists.”
– October 31, 1997
15. Alternately droll, irascible, self-righteous, self-pitying and intriguingly coy about longtime CIA ties, Tamraz provided the first vivid look at a largely maligned species during the 6-week-old hearing: a major political contributor.”
– September 19, 1997
16. “The surfacing of Kucinich, now a 50-year-old freshman Democratic congressman, as a droll amateur comic came at one of the humongous dinners that bring the capital’s media and political establishments together in mind-numbing orgies of smugness and self-congratulation.”
– February 2, 1997
17. “He’s healthy, droll and forever associated with his Baby and Child Care, which was published in May 1946, revised five times and sold a stunning 43 million copies.”
– May 17, 1996
18. “Well, to be honest, the way it’s put by Florence King, a wonderfully droll essayist, in Feb. 12 National Review is thus: ‘Any woman who goes on television and discusses her affairs, betrayals, suicide attempts, and vomiting habits, and then says, I’m a very strong person, is an American.'”
– Feb. 16, 1996
19. “A Minnesota native, he is an unabashed liberal who has directed the First Couple in two droll spoofs at the Gridiron dinner; the annual homage to Washington’s media and political establishment.”
– January 21, 1996
20. “Well, at least in the mind of Chicago native Sidney Blumenthal, a cerebral and droll Washington-based special political correspondent for The New Yorker magazine and author of a fine book on the 1988 presidential campaign, Pledging Allegiance.”
– January 21, 1996
21 “But there it is, in Nov. 27 National Review, as droll essayist King offers a dissertation on the ‘rogue conscience’.”
– November 17, 1995
22. “The ever-entertaining, if at times too-droll-by-half, O’Rourke offers a defense of libertarianism and a broadside at the collectivist overreaching he equates (as does the card-carrying liberal Greider to some extent) with government, albeit a tad defensively.”
– June 29, 1995
23. “Recent well-publicized performances, in debating NAFTA with Ross Perot and being droll (if very premeditated) on David Letterman’s show, have helped to deflate his image as a stiff.”
– April 21, 1994
24. “I was soon followed by Novak, whose fearsome TV persona (‘Prince of Darkness’ is a nickname) was belied by magnanimity in greeting me, a stranger, and launching into droll recollections of the then-resolutely right-wing Tribune bureau when he got to Washington 36 years ago as a wire service reporter.”
– January 9, 1994
25. “Anyway, she’s droll here, conceding that she has been caught smoking about a dozen times, panicked at her first sight of in-flight phones (she thought people could call her), and much prefers friends with private jets (‘in a friend a good personality trait is a Gulfstream’).”
– January 6, 1994
26. “Husni, 40, a droll Lebanese Christian raised in Tripoli, Lebanon, knows this media errata better than anyone because, besides teaching journalism at the University of Mississippi, he chronicles new magazines with the specificity Margaret Mead used in inspecting child-rearing on Samoa.”
– March 11, 1993
27. “Von Hoffman’s is a droll essay on books and politicians, who ‘by and large don’t read’.”
– February 11, 1993
28. “Stevens, 37, recently left her job running a public relations firm and, with four partners (three straights and one gay), started Cardthartic Inc., 814 N. Franklin St. It relies on lesbian and gay artists and writers to produce genteel and droll cards found in about 75 mostly gay-oriented stores in 30 states.”
– November 29, 1992
29. “Was this, I asked, the Paul Brancato who since 1987 has created provocative, and informative, trading cards on events rife with collusion and intrigue, including John Kennedy’s assassination, the Iran-Contra scandal, and worldwide drug wars; cards with a droll and leftish – or, as he prefers, ‘humanist’ – thrust, found in comic book and alternative book stores nationwide?”
– September 27, 1992
30. “Unfortunately, ‘they weren’t part of our elite distribution force,’ said a droll Deford, editor of the paper, too many copies of which, sadly, are being stolen from honor boxes and not enough bought.”
– June 2, 1991
31. “Meanwhile, the April-May Investment Vision, an imaginative new business publication, has superior economics free-lancer L.J. Davis on the stupidity that helps explain the nation’s banking mess; Donald Katz, author of a fine Sears Roebuck & Co. biography, on the ‘Holy War’ between fundamentalist Southern Baptists and moderates to control $3.2 billion in assets entrusted to Dallas-based Annuity Board of the Southern Baptist Convention; and a droll but serious dissection on the link between the weather and investing. ($2.50, 82 Devonshire St. R25A, Boston, Mass., 02109)”
– April 11, 1991
32. “Andy Rooney, a star of CBS’ popular 60 Minutes who often begins his commentaries with whiny and droll queries, was suspended for at least three months without pay because of racist remarks attributed to him in a national gay magazine.”
– February 9, 1990
33. “The article ranges from the droll, including the ways she intentionally tweeks a staid village and the curious attachment the region’s citizens have for Oregon, to the melancholy of the Mademoiselle’s physical deterioration and the suspicion that change is nipping at her vines and is likely to end her charming era.”
– January 4, 1990
34. “For the week of June 12, he crafted panels on the protest that would have seemed typically droll if it hadn’t been for the bloody government measures taken shortly after he sent the strips to Universal Press Syndicate for distribution.”
– June 8, 1989
35. “The June Esquire offers a fine mix of the damning (via Hayden), the droll (a Michael J. Fox tale) and the melancholy (a Muhammad Ali profile), all of which outshines a cover story on comic Robin Williams.”
– May 25, 1989
36. “The April Texas Monthly has a neatly droll and revealing look at predicaments for the propertied class and caring friends via Alison Cook’s primer on how to act in an era of austerity.”
– April 1, 1987
37. “The October issue of New England Monthly, one of several regional publications that dwarf Chicago magazine in quality and imagination, profiles this curious human subculture in ‘Nerd University.’ It’s an MIT professor’s droll look at the most obsessive inhabitants of a maniacally rigorous world.”
– October 8, 1986
38. “The June issue of House & Garden highlights the daunting social predicament via a droll tale, ‘Tipping in America.’ It’s by Alexander Cockburn, a talented journalist known for his refinement, rage and fervently leftist analyses of political affairs.”
– May 22, 1985
Posted on July 22, 2008