Word: joke
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...These are the saddest loking dummesehullen I ever looked down on What on earth made all these blank faces flock to my course? Last year's crop was a fine, studious crowd. Appreciative too: they knew a good joke when they heard one. They laughed every time I told it. But this bunch! Well, I'll have to get through the hour somehow. Then back to Boccaccio. Think I'll read over those passages in Rabelais again. Nothing like those fine old writers to make the fire of youth surge once more through these old veins. Hm-m time...
...sounds like one of those pulpy domestic morals with which the jaded directors are so fond of fabling. That is just what it is. The message is a domestic warning to males. Confide in your wife, it counsels. Tell her all your troubles and your problems. Tell her a joke now and then. All this is demonstrated through the medium of a cabaret girl who married an earnest youth and got on amiably with him despite her inconspicuous beginnings. Another, more propitious, marriage in the picture crumbled because the principals were partners but not companions. Doris Kenyon helps matters along...
...cruel joke that the State, which decrees compulsory education within a certain age limit, should also decree that the student, forbidden to work, is barred out of school more than a quarter of his share of fleeting time...
...American mobocracy, having destroyed all personal tyrants, delights to impose the tyranny of custom upon itself. The latest outrage is a strict order that all good Americans must discard their winter footgear by the first of May, if they dare to appear upon the streets. The annual straw hat joke is perpetrated so thoroughly that to the vulgar mind a soft hat seems ridiculous after a certain date. Advertising and the mob's fear of itself have set this barbaric custom beyond the reach of common sense. If the boot and shoe dealers succeed in their resolution of attaching another...
...goes the bell. Out of bed leaps the public. While the public yawns and stretches, a cheery, conversational gentleman in Newark tells his "early birds" that it is time for their morning exercises. He cracks a small joke or two "to liven things up" and, to be even more amusing, uses the studio props-"crickets"' and other noise-making contraptions - to represent creaking joints and splitting pajama legs. The command is given, a piano strikes up, the conversational gentleman barks out the count, mixing in banter and joviality...