Impossible interview

Dr. Samuel Johnson vs. Alexander Woollcott

DR. JOHNSON: I beg your pardon, sir, who are you, and what are you doing on this shelf beside me? MR. WOOLLCOTT: AS a battological vocabularian, I must admit that the faintly verbose lexicon of which you were, if memory serves, the author, is effectively buried today in the fusty archives of history— DR. JOHNSON: If I may interrupt, what in Hades are you driving at? MR. WOOLLCOTT: It is the sentimental desire of this old bust to express to you his faintly beamish gratitude for having compiled that aforesaid heterogeneous conglomeration of verbiage, by means of which your indefatigable gossipmonger has been enabled to slip into a pleonastic prose-style which Dottie Parker, on a fine May morning whilst sipping an aperitif in a rickshaw, bowling down the Rue de la Paix in Moscow with William Lyon Phelps, termed his "anecdotage". My name, sir, is Alexander Woollcott and there is only one thing which I need to establish my right to sit beside you.

DR. JOHNSON: And what, sir, do you suggest that may be?

MR. WOOLLCOTT: What I need, Dr. Johnson, is a Boswell.

DR. JOHNSON: Boswell, what you need is a Dr. Johnson.

JOHN RIDDELL