Whether your tastes in comedy run to subtle wit or to custard-pie slapstick, "The Man Who Came To Dinner" is your meat. And since it's scheduled to run for a full week at the U.T., you'll have plenty of time to satisfy your appetite.

Lifted almost bodily from the Kaufmann-Hart stage success, "T.M.W.C.T.D." is just as funny as its flesh-and-blood counterpart. What it lacks in a few Hays-ened cracks, it makes up for in some deft characterizations that even the stage-play couldn't boast.

You probably know as much about the story already, even if you haven't seen the picture or the show, as you do about Alexander Woolcott's glee in having a play written about his thousand-and-one ways to lose friends and alienate people. If he doesn't sue the authors for libel, he has either a magnificent sense of humor or such atrocious manners that he deserves having Kaufmann and Hart throw verbal darts at him.

Briefly, the story has to do with a big-time literary know-it-all's attempts to bring the mountain to Mohammed while he undergoes a forced period of convalescence at the home of a hapless Ohio family to whose home he had gone for dinner. Between conducting benefits for delinquents, harnessing penguins from Admiral Byrd, and attempting to run the affairs of his unwilling host, our hero has a busy time for himself and all concerned, and furnishes an hilarious hour and a half for his audience.

Monty Wooley, former Yale professor-turned-actor, proves again that it's only a Yale man who will accept an invitation for dinner and stay for six weeks. He is superb as Sheridan Whiteside, the bearded book of Bartlett's Nasty Quotations, who is this country's greatest argument for mercy killing. Bette Davis, pleasingly different without a neurosis or two to keep her company, plays the role of his long-suffering and fast-talking secretary with sparkle and deftness. And Reginald Gardner is more like Noel Coward than Noel Coward himself.

All along the line, the performances are just what Woolcott would have ordered. They've got enough spice to make them tasty, and more than enough wit to make them toothsome.