It also made a difference to hear theatergoers respond to certain scenes, like a smart quip Senna makes to Jean-Marie Balestre during a drivers' meeting, or when Alain Prost flirts with a beautiful British talk show host.
Off Wayne goes each night, tramping down the garden, dog Fly at his heel, smart quip at the ready, to iron his shirt for the morning and bed down in his caravan next to the pigs.
Sarah Michelle Gellar continuously fought the undead in Joss Whedon's whip-smart quip-em-up, bopping vamps and vanquishing evil spirits with something approaching glee.
However you parse Wilson's desperate act, it is clear that in an instant-fix, cure-all culture — one in which we habitually reduce fraught real-life dramas into smart-alecky quips on late-night talk shows — we want instant-fix, cure-all answers.
There is possibly another reason why it's smart for Quip to enhance conversation features on the app: competition.
Portraits of the youthful George W. tend toward the extremes, presenting him either as a paragon of decency, street smarts, charisma and quips, like some Republican John F. Kennedy, or else as a spoiled dolt who (as was said of his father) was born on third base believing that he had hit a triple.
On the contrary, with social media today, only the smartest, most intelligent quips and variations on memes are rewarded.
Everything that would crystallise in The West Wing and that he would subsequently repeat in Studio 60 and The Newsroom, each time with diminishing returns, is here: the sharp soliloquies, the smart replies, the snappy quips intended to recall the whip-smart dialogue of the 1940s.
