Of its time ...

... There at the New Yorker | The Weekly Standard. (Ht tip, Dave Lull.)

While he could cause laughter in others, Wolcott Gibbs was not himself a notably cheerful man. (“I suppose he was the unhappiest man I have ever known,” wrote his friend the playwright S. N. Behrman.) When a newly arrived writer at the New Yorker asked him if he had had a pleasant New Year’s, Gibbs instructed him to practice an anatomically impossible act on himself. This same want of conviviality found its way into his drama criticism, but with winning effect. He came across as the very opposite of the enthusiast—as a man much put upon, giving the clear impression that he wished he could have departed most plays after the first act; or better still, never left his apartment and gone to the theater in the first place.