Word: humored
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Communist Party in 1951 as a cheat and informer, has become a party hero since repudiating the testimony that he once copiously volunteered against Communists (TIME. Feb. 14). Questioned by Senator Eastland's Internal Security Subcommittee, Matusow alternately peddled the party line and his own brand of humor. With a sly smile he told of writing a poem, For Whom the Boom Dooms, about the H-bomb...
...book for Snake Oil was like most Drumbeats and Song plots, taking numerous, standard swings at rival colleges, freshman mixers, and Radcliffe food. Written and directed by Michael Vidor, the script and its humor was generally enjoyable, although perhaps overloaded with puns. As Amaryllis-Ann, the oil tycoon's daughter, Rosalind Froug added spark and charm to lines and a characterization which might otherwise have bordered on the routine. Speaking with an outrageous accent or singing with a pleasant, distinct voice, Miss Froug projects an case that is a delight to watch. Her oil-mad father is played by David...
Somehow I suspect that Stephen Potter wrote Sense of Humor because he thought he must. As the most popular humorous writer in contemporary English prose, his readers look to him for some kind of definitive comment on humor, which he surely does not give them in Sense of Humor. Mainly an anthology of various scraps of humor since Chaucer, it reels pompously though eight hundred years of English literature in search of some kind of principle. The most amusing thing about the book is that Potter could just as well have written his opening sentence, "The day of English humor...
Potter's plan is simply to divide all English humor into nine categories, with samples, and prefix one long introduction and nine shorter ones. Perhaps there is some virtue in classifying humor in this manner, as much, anyway, as there is in making nine arbitrary divisions of, say, literature since Homer. But it seems to me that the field is much too broad and amorphous to be handled in a book of under three hundred pages, or in any book at all, for that matter. Potter himself must realize this, when he says of humor: "Perhaps its history...
...Sense of Humor contains humorous writing, but very title of it is Potter's; it also contains some interesting ideas on the evolution of the British sense of humor. The format, however, is ridiculously ambitious. One finds oneself hoping that the conceptural scheme of the work is a literary practical joke, or "lifemanship" in practice by the master. Whether it is or not, Sense of Humor proves that humor, like children, is best seen and not heard about...