Word: humors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Behind the Iron Curtain last week, the business of being funny had struck a depression. Moscow's leading humorous weekly Krokodil had been called on the Kremlin carpet for "not fulfilling its purpose." In Poland, a Satirists' Congress was told sternly that jokes involving sex and mothers-in-law were no longer considered funny, though humor could still be drawn from the petty bourgeoisie, the bureaucrat and the speculator. Elsewhere, however, people swapped yarns just as they had before. Here & there TIME'S correspondents paused to listen...
...that is reminiscent of Will Rogers. His apprenticeship was served in traveling vaudeville shows ("I used to get $40 a week and all the road maps I could eat"), and as a front-line sergeant-entertainer with the Third Army in Germany. Through an interpreter, Shriner tried out his humor on the Russians. One joke they laughed at: "The mail service in our unit is very good. The mailman delivers packages to us as fast as he can smash them...
Maybe MGM was only fooling, and really trying to prove that super-swashbuckling is a superb form of screen humor. And yet there are some dreadful little moments, when the actors suddenly become deadpan, straining to get a dull point across. But these scenes are few, and fairly short. When they intrude, just think back a piece and remember D'Artagnan as he points his poinard to the sky and shouts "All for one!" and his comrades raise their rapiers and reply...
...attacked Warren's "nonpartisanship," and called for the elimination of the state's cross-filing system "so we will be sure candidates who run for public office on the Republican ticket shall subscribe to the principles of real Republicanism." Some other Old Guardsmen kept their sense of humor. Said one: "These boys have wrecked the party in three different national elections. Now it's only fair to give us a chance to wreck...
...Miss Tatlock, Brackett breaks three major movie taboos: a little fun is poked at insanity, the plot contains a suggestion of incest, and a pair of unregenerate frauds are treated with sympathy. By good humor and skillful gags he manages to avoid giving too much offense. His main device is humor, backed by humaneness. He makes the imbecile (John Lund) likable; he rouses pity for the girl (Wanda Hendrix) who believes, mistakenly, that she is falling in love with her dim-witted brother; and he makes a fair case for the idea that his swindlers (Lund and Barry Fitzgerald...