Word: jokes
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...essence of a good joke is that it means something different from what the reader expects. The essence of a Lampoon joke is that it means nothing whatever...
...verse. Slovenly verse is not funny though it may be ridiculous. Humorous verse requires the greatest perfection of form. A skillful rhymester uses his rhymes to point his wit and obtains additional effects by surprising rhymes. Everyone is familiar with the lamentable effect of even a good joke haltingly and redundantly told by a dullard who remembers it imperfectly and repeats it clumsily. Concise expression, accuracy, and fluency are essentials of wit in verse and even more in prose. Good humorous verse is not easy to write, but it is all the more worth writing...
...announcement today from the Office that all bills are to be paid only at the Harvard Trust Company, the accompanying request that they be paid by a check which can be mailed, and the suggestion that they be paid early ought to do away with a long standing joke...
...editorial comment. We cannot help wondering if the "New Republic" is expressing the opinion of unbiased thinkers in the country today. One would not suspect to find so conventional an attitude in so Promethean a periodical. The reviewer has apparently excavated the pre-historic, absent-minded professor from the joke column and cartoon page and shipped him intact to Harvard...
...many exciting moments--scenes which in a different atmosphere would have held the spectators breathless; to be sure, the audience was breathless anyhow, but in this case it was too spent with laughter to move. It could only sit and wait for the comedian, John Murphy, to crack another joke. Nor was it ever disappointed; the joke was always forth-coming and, what is more, it was always good. After two minutes of Mr. Murphy, no one in the house was able to take as anything but a joke the murder of a financier, the hysterics of his wife...