Word: humorful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bombast sometimes associated with evangelical pulpits. Pollard commands attention instead with infectious charm and an ingratiating, please-understand urgency, communicated by eyes and face as he leans out over the congregation. Since he finds that laymen always make the same two complaints about sermons (too long, too short on humor), he tries to oblige, honing his Sunday morning sermons to 22 minutes, often putting them on tape cassettes for memorization...
...about all of them. Most of the others range from very dirty to dirtier still, and all of them are quite funny. She does not take them seriously, and neither does the audience. She giggles instead of leers, and there is no feeling, as there is in most such humor, that someone is being put down...
Enough. A complete list of warnings would fill a shelf of books. Plainly the 20th century has turned into the Age of Admonition. It is also clear that the atmosphere is distributing more than a bit of anxiety. A modern form of morbid gallows humor ("Life is hazardous to your health"; "Everything causes cancer") has now become the respectable coin of small talk...
...biggest problem with Steven Spielberg's 1941 is its budget: this film is the most expensive Hollywood farce ever made. Certainly money has its uses in movies, but in a comedy? A key element of humor is surprise; jokes are funniest when they sneak up on the audience out of nowhere. In big-budget film making, the opportunities for comic am bush quickly disappear. Every joke announces itself in deafening stereo sound. Every pratfall is as momentous as Cecil B. DeMille's parting of the, Red Sea. Punch lines cannot be thrown away, but are instead hurled like...
...manipulated the press: the Ayatullah has been able to take noisy advantage of a bizarre news brownout, a month of "self-restraint" unparalleled in American life. Johnny Carson confesses on TV that he is having a harder time with his opening monologues; Art Buchwald, who gets most of his humor columns out of topical events, hasn't done a single column about Iran. Even presidential candidates have been biting their tongues about Iran, except for Connally's early macho outburst and Teddy Kennedy's intemperate denunciation of the Shah. In this distorted situation, nightly television news...