Kasia Boddy (born in Aberdeen, grew up in Glasgow, studied at Edinburgh, teaches at Cambridge) has a good review essay on Dorothy Parker at the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived); I’ll quote the beginning and let you click through if you’re interested:
Dorothy Parker dreaded repetition and found it everywhere. In 1919, when she was just 25 and only months into her stint as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic, she already claimed enough ‘bitter experience’ to know that ‘one successful play of a certain type’ would result in a ‘vast horde’ of copycats, ‘all built on exactly the same lines’. In quantity at least, this was Broadway’s golden age, just before radio and the movies ate up its audiences. At least five new shows opened each week and Parker sat through all the popular formulae: ‘crook plays’; Southern melodramas; bedroom farces; musical comedies; plays in which ‘everybody talks in similes’; and Westerns in which gold was ‘sure to be discovered at five minutes to eleven’.
Topical themes promised ‘novelty’ but that dwindled in the inevitable ‘follow-ups’. Parker noted a bevy of plays dealing with Prohibition, the ‘Irish question’ (‘what a rough day it will be for the drama when Ireland is freed’) and, worst of all, a ‘mighty army of war plays’ (‘I have been through so many … that I feel like a veteran’). Eventually the battlefield smoke cleared from the theatres, but the next slew of melodramas, about returning soldiers, was even more tedious. ‘Heaven knows the war was hard enough,’ she grumbled. ‘Now the playwrights are doing their best to ruin the peace for us.’
Once she had identified a formula, Parker didn’t devote much space to individual plays. Those she didn’t like could be summed up quickly – ‘The House Beautiful is the play lousy’ – while those she admired, such as Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, made her coy: ‘One is ashamed to place neat little bouquets of praise on this mighty conception.’ On the whole, she preferred ‘little, bitter twists of line and incident’ to ‘any amount of connected story’ and always had time for dog actors, swashbucklers and songs that rhymed ‘license’ with ‘five cents’. It was also easy to praise performances, whether on stage (Eddie Cantor, Jacob Ben-Ami and the ‘flawless’ Barrymore brothers were favourites) or in the stalls. Germs of short stories can be found in her descriptions of the couple who argue over Bernard Shaw’s symbols, the woman who ‘speculates, never in silence’ about what’s going to happen next, and the soldier who ‘condescendingly translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’
Parker was fired from Condé Nast in 1920, after some of Broadway’s biggest producers (all regular advertisers) complained about her constant savaging of their plays, and of Florenz Ziegfeld’s wife. She continued as a drama critic at Ainslee’s for another three years and then, in 1927, spent twelve months as ‘Constant Reader’, writing about books for the New Yorker and accruing what the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, described as a ‘mountain of indebtedness’. ‘Her Constant Reader,’ he insisted, ‘did more than anything to put the magazine on its feet, or its ear, or wherever it is today.’
Later, Boddy goes into the biography (“Born in 1893, she was originally Dottie Rothschild, but not, she always pointed out, one of those Rothschilds”) and says of her verses “The first that earned her a cheque – for $12 – was ‘Any Porch’, published by Vanity Fair in 1915, the same year that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ appeared in Poetry”; I was pleased to find that you can actually see that page of Vanity Fair at Google Books. And if you’re up for reading a piece on the decline of savaging, try Kelefa Sanneh’s “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge” (New Yorker, August 25, 2025; archived).
There’s one of them in my favourite bar. She always turns up for the ‘big games’ (or rather, I suspect her husband brings her in in the hope of some relief), points out only the bleedin’ obvious, talks over the commentators who are answering her very questions, and has clearly never actually handled a rugby ball.
I think we’ve all been in movie theaters with them. They’re not quite as annoying as the people who ask long, moronic questions at Q&A sessions with authors, movie directors, and the like, though. As long as we’re complaining (by which we honor Ms. Parker’s memory).
Imitation is not a sign that people know the secret of popularity. It is a sign that there is no secret, and the only thing that people know is the last thing that succeeded.
Derek Thompson in ‘Hit Makers’ (2017, p250)
Ken Hughes’s “Sammy” was staged in Israel in 1964 as סמי ימות בשש, “Sammy will Die at Six”. The famously harsh critic Haim Gamzu (who was honored by getting his own verb, לגמוז ligmoz “to give a harsh review”), wrote his shortest review ever:
לדידי, יכול יהיה למות בחמש.
For all I care, he can die at five.
Ha!
This made me wonder about a vaguely-remembered theater review. The title of the play almost offered itself for an easy negative reaction. “Dreadful Evening” was reviewed with one word: “Exactly.”
Not by Parker, but by Arthur Bingham Walkley, according to NY Times, Oct. 8, 1926.
@Yuval
This reminds me of a collection of to-the-point UK music reviews – one that stands out to this day was a single called “All the Way Up” which was reviewd with the very brief: “Don’t tempted me.” !
Ken Hughes’s “Sammy”
The film made from it (assuming this is the same Ken Hughes’ Sammy) actually sounds quite good:
https://vintageclassicsfilm.co.uk/movies/the-small-world-of-sammy-lee/
From what I can tell, Gamzu was not merely a vicious critic, but also a stuffy one, with none of the sparkle of Parker (that one-sentence review being the exception).
The verb ligmoz was a creation of the humorist Ephraim Kishon, and was one of his trademark expressions. He used it in the sense of ‘to demolish’, in many varied contexts. I don’t think anyone else used it.
The anecdote about Gamzu sounded familiar, and now that you mention Kishon, I think that I remember him alluding to it in one of his theater satires, where he warns authors against giving their plays titles that can be shot down with witty one-liners like that. Can’t check it because most of my books are in Germany. (Kishon was very popular in Germany in the 70s, and I read a lot of his books back then, giving me a probably somewhat skewed view of life in Israel.)
Greek tragedy (including Crichton’s Jurassic Park): all who have burdened guilt upon their shoulders die.
Kishon tragedy: everyone dies except the politician and his secretary, the two people who caused the catastrophe.