Word: jokes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reputation for fairness outweighed such qualms. Indeed, there is a joke in Israel about an engineer who built a highway. When asked how he had made it so straight, he replied, "Simple. I took Yona Efrat to the site and told him to lie down." The engineer could as easily have chosen Kahan or Barak...
...Edythe and prevent their union. This "conflict" functions merely as a device to leave Billy and Edythe separated, but still in love, at the end of the first act. (Sometime during Act II, the Prince finally produces the photographs, which elicit only a throwaway line and an obvious joke from Billy.) Similarly, there exists little reason why, in the second act, Edythe flees to Morocco, taking the entire cast with her. Without an involving and sustained conflict, and with an equally unengaging resolution, the musical seems unanchored from the outset...
MISSING FLORIDA BOY FOUND DEAD AFTER LONG SEARCH. CALIFORNIA MAN SURRENDERS KIDNAPED BOY AFTER 7 YEARS. The tragedy of the kidnaped child is society's meanest joke on the fussy optimism of parents. Without a Trace, loosely based on the disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz from a SoHo street in 1979, is an earnest, fatally muddled attempt to dramatize this dilemma. A boy is missing; his mother (Kate Nelligan) and father (David Dukes) wait and wait, not daring to despair; a sympathetic detective (Judd Hirsch) trudges after tantalizing leads; a kind of life goes...
...puckering their lips around one of the novelty numbers of comparatively recent vintage, like Short People. (Remember "Short people got no reason to live"?) Says the composer, who will have scarfed up the cocktail peanuts by this time and will likely be heading for home: "That song was a joke. It's about someone who is insane. Nobody harbors that kind of animus toward short people." Then, typically, he adds the cruncher: "Except...
...disturbing element here, however, the one this story exposed to the air, is the implication that these processes, which satisfy that basic human desire and which do so by manipulating a basic human act, are merely mechanical, technologically clever, new testaments to American know-how. Pregnant women often joke gently about their offspring "in the oven," but in a joke-less context, where the baby in question is being cooked up on consignment, there is cause for real worry. With all the potential joys of scientifically created parenthood, the last thing one wishes to encourage is the impersonal approach. What...