Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on 'canned' laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.

When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.

It was clear soon after his election that Obama, like FDR, wanted to start dealing with the economic crisis immediately after his inauguration.

Now scarcely a week goes by without a news story about the cops swooping down on some adolescent prowler who is as skilled at breaking into computer systems as defense contractors are at breaking into the Federal budget.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

Unpleasant questions are being raised about Mother's Day. Is this day necessary? . . . Isn't it bad public policy? . . . No politician with half his senses, which a majority of politicians have, is likely to vote for its abolition, however. As a class, mothers are tender and loving, but as a voting bloc they would not hesitate for an instant to pull the seat out from under any Congressman who suggests that Mother is not entitled to a box of chocolates each year in the middle of May.