Word: humoredly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Remnants of Gallows' Humor. Only slowly did the full content of the Hitler horror dawn on the Warsaw Jews. At first it seemed that in the German victory over Poland, they would only exchange one anti-Semitic prison for another. Even when that illusion died, much wry humor remained. The Germans were "the others." An "organist" was a reliably bribed German or official. A "musical" was a man who would take an occasional bribe. "Caterpillar tanks" was the word for those refugees so heavily burdened with their belongings that they could barely crawl. Deported Jews coming into Poland wearing...
...even gallows' humor wore thin as the Germans developed their policy of divide and kill. The leaders of the Jewish community were conscripted into a council and forced to help doom their own people. They had to deliver a certain quota of slave laborers, and so it was agents of the council itself who fingered the victims. Another council-the Thirteen-came into being. Its job was to tie off the last artery of hope, the flow of smuggled goods from somewhere outside hell. The Thirteen hoped to buy time from the Nazis, and many a Jew hoped...
Ranging through all times and cultures for their humor, erudite Clowns Wayne and Shuster neither flaunt their learning nor talk down to their audience. Says Wayne: "There is an undercurrent of fairly competent acting in what we do. But we mostly look like a couple of accountants who can't get the same balance...
...Catholic students (275 in an enrollment of 5,500) hopping mad. Members of the Newman Club promptly consulted with Father Cronan F. Kelly, director of the Catholic student center, decided on a counterblast. The resulting document relaxed a tense situation and sent students home for vacation in high good humor...
Mockery & Ecstasy. Young Twain permitted himself a coarse though spirited mixture of cornball humor, village atheist mockery, and a mulishly provincial contempt for most people and things foreign. The Portuguese were "lazy louts," the Neapolitans were "a bad lot," the Greeks were "a community of thieves," Jews were "greasy," Italians groped "in the midnight of priestly superstition," and Arabs "carried passengers in their hair." Beneath the invective lurked a cultural inferiority complex and a desperate anxiety not to be taken in. Twain regarded religious relics and purported miracles as "frauds" and "swindles": "I find a piece of the true cross...