Word: humors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Letters from the Earth, by Mark Twain. A long-suppressed assault on religion that demonstrates the author's humor at its savage, scatalogical best...
...asked, "You realize. General, that my family is of French origin?" De Gaulle exclaimed drily: "Well now, so is mine!"* At the same banquet, Jacqueline Kennedy bubbled: "You, General, who have known so many interesting people in your life, tell me, which one had the greatest sense of humor?" De Gaulle's deadpan reply: "Stalin, Madame...
There was little trace of cold war nerves. Once, when a dancer was asked a question in Russian, he demanded suspiciously: "Are you from the State Department?" But most of the time, the Russian sense of humor, which is generally left at home by everyone, poured out uninhibitedly. At a street festival in the city's principal Italian colony, for example, the group was confronted by an earnest patriot who was trying to pin small American flags to the blouses and lapels of everyone in the jammed crowd. One Russian boy let himself get pinned. Others laughed...
...brought out three new primers whose characters are mostly Negro children. Aided by the Ford Foundation-financed Great Cities School Improvement Program, the books are the work of four Detroit educators who analyzed slum tots' talk, concluded that they need short primers with fewer words, more drama and humor. The books-Fun with David, Play with Jimmy, Laugh with Larry-do not improve on the much criticized run-Spot-run style of older primers. But now most of the faces are brown,"kitty" replaces "pony," David makes mud pies on the front stoop, Mother hangs the wash...
Mark Twain's dazzling Missouri humor always had hints of despair. Dark brooding crept into such cheerful works as The Innocents Abroad and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; it filled later works like The Mysterious Stranger, virtually blotting out all gaiety. The last writing Twain did, in 1909, was such a lugubrious assault on man and God that Twain's surviving daughter, Clara Samossoud, refused to let it be published. In this, she followed the half-jesting advice of Twain himself. "Tomorrow," he wrote William Dean Howells, "I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs...