1934 R. Nichols Fisbo ii. xvii. 58 I don't like his map, his boffos or his frail.

1950 Sat. Rev. Lit. (U.S.) 4 Nov. 27 The boffo, he said, is the laugh that kills, and he lamented the loss of the boffo in talking comedy. Tittering, yes; an occasional yowl, a rare belly laugh. But the art of the boffo seemed gone forever.

1957 S. J. Perelman Road to Miltown 193 Chico approached Groucho with hand extended. ‘I'd like-a to say goombye to your wife.’.. ‘Who wouldn't?’ riposted his brother. This boffo ushered in the second scene.

1982 Sports Illustr. (Nexis) 25 Jan. 32 San Franciscans have long been adept at laughing in the face of adversity..but over these many years the 49ers have sorely tested our susceptibility to graveside boffos.

1993 Gazette (Montreal) (Nexis) 13 Jan. b2 No one expected to get many laughs from the increasingly bitter, vehement debate over the fate of Hotel Dieu hospital. But there's no lack of boffos now.

1947 Philadelphia Evening Bull. 19 May 22/4 The zany Brewsters [in the play Arsenic & Old Lace] and their basement cemetery still get laughs—boffo laughs.

1973 Daily Colonist (Victoria, Brit. Columbia) 29 July 2/2 Dave Barrett got off some boffo lines and had them chuckling.

1992 R. Manning Swamp Root Chron. vii. 104 We spent so much time ‘casting’ the show and laughing at each other's recitals of boffo scenes that we got very little onto paper.

2000 Village Voice (N.Y.) (Nexis) 4 July 78 Lester's writing—his self-mocking confessionals, left-field generalizations, free-form metaphors, effortless epithets, and boffo laugh lines—..touched his readers.

1943 Variety 12 May 8/1 It has a cast that reads like an out-of-this-world benefit,..and the blend is plenty boffo.

1954 A. Mayer in J. W. Krutch et al. Is Common Man too Common? 61 Now, in the classic words of Variety, it was ‘boffo or busto’, meaning there was no longer any middle ground and every picture was either a click or a cluck.

1964 J. Didion Slouching towards Bethlehem 155 Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three was a boffo (cf. Variety) spoof of international relations.

1971 It 2 June 11/3 Gotham's latest boffo smash, Oh, Albania.

1989 U.S. News & World Rep. 26 June 11/1 The Mall of America hopes to thrive as a boffo regional entertainment center.

1997 ‘S. Shem’ Mount Misery vii. 215 What a boffo session, Doc... I feel better.

1945 Pageant Apr. 71/1 A ‘boffo’ Variety review means money in the bank.

1996 Boston Herald (Nexis) 2 May 1 The 100-minute movie was also screened last weekend at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival to boffo reviews, including ‘absolutely astonishing’ and ‘positively unreal’.

2000 Sci. Amer. Sept. 90/2 A prof who had given Johnson's dictionary a boffo review in a Scots literary mag.

1950 in H. Wentworth & S. B. Flexner Dict. Amer. Slang (1960) 50/1 Betty [Grable] was signed by 20th-Fox and started her string of box-office boffos.

1974 Publishers Weekly 16 Sept. 53/1 The suspense and the laughs are served up expertly and the finale is a genuine boffo.

1988 New Scientist 7 Jan. 112/1 Clearly a boffo, a whammy, I thought at the time, but not in the cool light of 1988.

1998 Denver Westword (Nexis) 24 Sept. Past showings have included The English Patient, L.A. Confidential, The Crying Game and other future box-office boffos.