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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.

Russell Baker

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Russell Baker
Age: 93 †
Born: 1925
Born: August 14
Died: 2019
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Journalist
Writer
Morrisonville
Virginia
Russell Wayne Baker
Dead
Grafted
Television
Thrived
Comedy
Canned
Situation
Technicians
Audience
Audiences
Years
Using
Laughter
Records

More quotes by Russell Baker

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My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.
Russell Baker
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Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.
Russell Baker
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People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
Russell Baker
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It is safest to shut up and pay, which is what I shall eventually do, though I shall hate having to sell the children.
Russell Baker
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It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.
Russell Baker
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Long words, fat talk they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?
Russell Baker
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Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
Russell Baker
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It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.
Russell Baker
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In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
Russell Baker
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A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.
Russell Baker
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Journalist: A person with nothing on his mind and the power to express it.
Russell Baker
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The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Russell Baker
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The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.
Russell Baker
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Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
Russell Baker
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You can always tell folks from nonfolks. Folks like to feel good, like to smile for the camera when there's a big photo opportunity for a really good cause.
Russell Baker
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American foreign policy had still not recovered from its victory over communism when George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice took over at the White House in 2001.
Russell Baker
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There are good reasons why everybody should heed politicians' advise not to believe the media. One of the best is that the media report what politicians say.
Russell Baker
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Ireland really is my problem the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is
Russell Baker
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A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.
Russell Baker
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Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
Russell Baker