Tynan

 On Bea Lillie

The traditional comic formula is: Tell them what you’re going to do; do it; then tell them you’ve done it. Miss Lillie’s is: Tell them what you might do; do something else; then deny having done it. Even the famous purchase of the double-damask dinner napkins embodies her basic theme: the utter futility of the English language. Nobody is a more devout anthologist of the whimpers, sighs, and twitters that the human race emits in its historic struggle against intelligibility.