[Ads-l] "A comic does funny things; a comedian does things funny"

[Mark Mandel]

I've often noticed that "flat adverb" in current usage. Funnily enough,
though we have the suffixed form, I don't think I've seen it except, as
just now, in the sense of "oddly", and perhaps mostly in this very phrase.

Mark Mandel

On Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 2:40 AM ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Resurrecting a thread from January 2020.
> Here is a 1915 citation that draws a distinction between doing "things
> funny" and doing "funny things". Unfortunately, the author of the
> article is not identified.
>
> [ref] 1915 December 2, The Huntington Press, 'White Elephant', Home
> Talent Play Draws Big Crowd, Quote Page 8, Column 1, Huntington,
> Indiana. (Newspapers_com) [/ref]
>
> https://www.newspapers.com/image/40250363/
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> Dwight Fanning made an ideal travelling salesman and won laugh after
> laugh more through his ability to do things funny rather than the
> funny things he did. He was most excellent all the way through the
> show.
> [End excerpt]
>
> Garson
>
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 3:32 PM Ben Yagoda <byagoda at udel.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Question for Garson: On Facebook, I just encountered a quote attributed
> to Buster Keaton: “A comedian things does funny things. A good comedian
> does things funny.” I was skeptical of the attribution (partly because of
> the flat adverb) but when I Googled the quote I found lots of Keaton
> attributions. But Wikipedia quoted a variant (citing Simpson’s Contemporary
> Quotations, 1988) and attributed it to Ed Wynn: "A comic says funny things;
> a comedian says things funny.”
> >
> > That jogged my memory that when I encountered the quote years ago the
> contrast was indeed comic/comedian instead of comedian/good comedian.
> >
> > Anyway, Garson, I’d appreciate it if you sleuth out this quote.
> >
> > Ben
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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