Word: gagged
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...time to bring out all the old jokes, time for some radio clown to pose the 75 million-franc question: "Name all the French Premiers since 1947," and for the cocktail-party gag, "Do you think the Algerians will get a government before we do?" Some Frenchmen, it is true, seem to regard the crisis as the next-to-last straw. Thunders Editor Pierre Brisson in Figaro: "It is no longer a Parliament, but a monstrous jamming enterprise. The conclusion is to reform or disappear. The margin for the Assembly is only a thread's width." But, unhappily...
Some nights, everything just goes right. I Am a Camera is very funny, but it is more than a ramshackle frame on which gag lines are hung. Playwright John Van Druten found some real people in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, and around them he built a real play. He does not go very deeply into the question he raises of hedonism versus social involvement, but it is nice to have an issue to fill the brief spaces between laughs...
Even before the voice could offer telephone numbers for getting the name of a recommended physician, the pranksters were howling at the caller's consternation. And city health officials wore a slightly abashed look over their role as unwitting accomplices in setting up an epidemic gag...
...gag spread, the officials were more jubilant than embarrassed. Their hit record is drawing 5,000 callers a day-so heavy a load that two of their five answering machines burned out and had to be repaired. The payoff: prompted by the message, 70 VD victims daily are telephoning for help. Says one official: "Every case cured helps us to break the chain of infection. We could have spent thousands on propaganda and never begun to get such results...
...even rich. One day, mostly for want of anything better to do. they decide to play a practical joke. One of them is assigned to make love to her, propose to her, and at the very last minute, maybe just before the wedding, tell her it was all a gag...