Today is Sunday, Feb. 25, the 56th day of 2007. There are 309 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On Feb. 25, 1913, the 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution, giving Congress the power to levy and collect income taxes, was declared in...

Mel Tolkin, the head writer for Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows," which defined the art of sketch comedy during television's Golden Age, has died. He was 94.Tolkin died of heart failure on Monday at his Century City home, said his son, writer-director Michael Tolkin.Tolkin...

All of Harley Granville-Barker’s great Edwardian plays are about moral corruption, which accounts for the run of timely revivals. In 1999, the excellent Mint Theater Company staged Barker’s drama about financial greed and hypocrisy, The Voysey Inheritance—the same play that David Mamet recently adapted. Now,...

[With] the premiere of [United States] …, it should be clear that a TV breakthrough has occurred worthy of heavy study…. Yet no one seems to be noticing. On paper, it's a simple proposition. United States is about marriage…. Familiar as it may sound, though, Larry Gelbart has given us a show that violates all the rules of sitcom, a game as rigid as pinochle.

Movie Movie is a dum-dum title for a pair of skillful parodies that were written by Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller under the provisional title Double Feature. The idea is to stir up our happy memories of early talkies—especially the Warners fight pictures and musicals, with their tenement-born heroes and heroines who conquered the big city…. The lines are stylized, cryptic: the dialogue of the thirties has been compacted into its essential clichés, which the characters innocently mism...

Be warned. A man might die laughing at "Sly Fox." What Larry Gelbart once helped do for Plautus in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," he has now done for Ben Jonson in "Sly Fox."… Mr. Gelbart has resuscitated the great Elizabethan, modernized him, given him a new set of clothes and married him off to the old traditions of American vaudeville. There is little point in comparing Mr. Jonson with Mr. Gelbart; the original play, "Volpone,�...