Word: joke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Dylan's Village days, also pointed up their dinosaur-like qualities: Bobby Neuwirth's beer belly, and his inability to hit the high, or low notes; Ramblin' Jack's memory loss in the middle of songs that seemed never to end. In a way, Rolling Thunder was a cruel joke--Dylan's goodbye to all that, his smug see-how-I've-changed-and-they-haven't-and-aren't-they-pathetic-but-give-them-a-good-hand-and-we'll-do--"Black Diamond Bay." The Moral: While Rolling Thunder was the name of the tour, it was also...
...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...
...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...
...illustration, Paulos offers the one about a fellow who goes to a computer dating service seeking a partner who is short, gregarious, formally attired and fond of water sports. "We are led by the joke so far along one meaning surface," says Paulos. "Then comes the punch line. . . the service provides the man with a penguin. We are suddenly jumped across an ambiguity in semantics, from one surface of meaning to another, in a way that can be represented by a mathematical catastrophe...
Silber denied the charge, maintaining that a "joke" he made at a 1973 meeting of the B.U. board of trustees' Select Committee on University Needs had been misinterpreted...