Word: humorously
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...blacks. Somebody in the corridors or outside always had a radio, and somebody was always dancing." Says Travolta, "Whatever new dance came to school, I learned it. I think the blacks accepted me because I cared about them accepting me. They seemed to have a better sense of humor, a looser style. I wanted to be like that." One day, coming back on the school bus from a football game, some of the team started singing a James Brown song with the chorus, "Say it loud/ I'm black and I'm proud!" Travolta waited for his moment, then retaliated...
...Maria Remarque made a kindred point: "Not to laugh at the 20th century is to shoot yourself." Yet the sad fact is that mirth in the U.S. is neither what it once was nor what it might be. As early as 1968, in The Rise and Fall of American Humor, English Professor Jesse Bier solemnly declared that "we are in great part humorless as never before." Other humor experts, who cannily refuse to be associated with their opinions, believe that laughter has continued to dwindle because Americans are losing their former skill at recognizing humor when it comes along unannounced...
...come in the form of a new theory that offers to identify humor with mathematical precision. John Paulos, mathematics professor at Philadelphia's Temple University, has worked out a way to plumb the anatomy of a joke by applying to it a marvelous flight of mathematical wizardry known as the catastrophe theory. It is based on a dazzle of equations so dense not even a child trained in the new math could grasp...
...different levels and a point moving along one surface, until suddenly it plunges to another surface. The plunge of the point marks the convergence of the conditions that give rise to such catastrophes as war, riot, chemical explosion, deodorant failure. In Paulos' application of the theory to humor, the surfaces represent levels of shifting meaning, the point becomes the leading edge of a joke, its plunge signals the punch line...
True, it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of this insight, but the effort should be made. After all, a surefire way to penetrate even the most obscure jokes would be a blessing to any era. And in this time, a humor-detector promises to provide the precise guide that is the very thing Americans need...