Canned Laughter.

CANNED LAUGHTER by Peter Hay (Oxford University Press, 262 p.) is an amusing, well-written and sometimes even enlightening collection of quips, bon mots and anecdotes about famous people (mostly performers and newsmen) in the entertainment business. It's certainly going to be widely consulted by people looking for a funny introduction to a speech and - sporadically - it makes good reading.

Hay, who wrote the remarkable MGM: When the Lion Roars history, here dips into that vast resevoir of stories and quotes, some funny, some pithy, some not, and, in each case, provides a kind of "frame" for the story, which certainly provides added impact. The book is fun, if somewhat repetitious, and there are times when one wonders why a given quote was included.

Hany of the one-liners are memorable. Barbara Waiters, who sounds like she's got a potato in her mouth, and can't pronounce her r's, suggests that a script line mentioning Mount Ararat be changed to Mount Cisco; Robert MacNell of The News Hour, when asked whether his mother had always aimed for a career in broadcasting, shoots back with, :No. I think she had hoped for something better." An anonymous actor, when asked whether he had experience of performing without audiences, replies, "Plenty. I used to play Shakespeare on the road."

And so it goes, on and on, a varied collection of humor, some of it fun, some lightweight-fluff, some clever and going to the heart of things.