Word: humoral
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Problems of translation--either from Russian to English, or from a culture that lived under Stalin to one that knows it only by report--retard Voinovich's humor, and thus his point, in the rest of the story...
...raid produced a rather bizarre footnote generated by my warped sense of humor. An officer briefing me on the raid apologized for its failure. I told him not to apologize, joking that no doubt they had brought back a baby water buffalo, and the North Vietnamese were going crazy trying to figure out why we had mounted a big operation for that purpose. The officer, presuming that the President's security adviser could not be totally mad, reported this to his superiors, who started a hunt for the animal. The troops in the field, convinced that Washington had lost...
...byzantine as those of Nixon, he accomplished with verve and surprising good will what Nixon performed with grim determination and inward resentment. Laird liked to win, but unlike Nixon, derived no great pleasure from seeing someone else lose. There was about him a buoyancy and a rascally good humor that made working with him as satisfying as it could on occasion be maddening...
Author John Barth, 49, began his career in the guise of a realist with a somewhat spooky sense of humor. The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) appeared as slim companion pieces; they pivoted on the same philosophical question, i.e., how to impose values on a neutral universe; and both dwelt on despair as a source of grim comedy. But they were also set in a recognizable version of Maryland's Eastern Shore and populated with conventional characters. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) changed course. An encyclopedic parody of 18th century English picaresque fiction...
Surely, I thought, there was plenty of mirth in this sacred land across the Charles River. But then I thought about football, and the humor of the situation quickly escaped me. There was, in fact, nothing funny at all about B.U., Harvard or anything connected with the two--so long as football is involved...