Word: humor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...returned to the attack after graduation by editing the anti-establishment weekly, the Texas Observer, but he also learned some facts of political life. "The heavy hand was not only ineffective," he reflects, "it was usually irrelevant. Humor was essentially a way of surviving, and it was no coincidence that every good man I knew had a deep and abiding sense of the absurd...
THEN, one night, we all got together at a friend's house. No strangers, that is, no potential informers. And the old spirit came back. For hours we told one another the latest anti-junta jokes. The Greeks have a biting sense of humor. When the coup came, the terrified people, totally unprepared for resistance, reacted with the only weapon it then had-ridicule...
Eviscerating Birchers. National Review preaches mainly to the converted; it has a way of repeating itself without offering many new ideas. It does bring off a certain humor each issue-a quality that recommends it to readers who are otherwise appalled by its politics. The liveliest section of the magazine, "The Week," consists of random notes, arch and wry, on a variety of consequential and not so consequential topics...
Dispassionately, he records that social and intellectual snobbery was her worst defect, and he notes with a stranger's eye "a streak of incongruous archness in her humor which is almost ladylike and very disconcerting." Woolf mentions friendships, but the reader feels no warmth. He writes most affectionately of a marmoset named Mitz (the gift of a Rothschild), which rode on his shoulder on a tour of Hitler's Germany. The monkey stole the show and distracted the Brownshirts from Woolf's culpable Jewishness...
...knowledge of death has never got between him and life. His sense of humor has never been overrun. When the Greek government requisitioned a piece of land he owned for use as a military cemetery, Seferis said: "Alas, even if they gave it back I fear it would be hard to raise the rent." To read Seferis is to experience a sense of honesty, a cool scorn for any kind of evasion. His austere prescription for self-knowledge is, therefore, almost predictable...