Word: jokey
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fitting. Look at any recent film by the Former Artist Known as Coppola. Check your local theater marquee, where endless variations of the same $100 million jokey-action movie are displayed. Or consider that the company making the most maverick pictures today, Miramax, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Disney. It's enough to make you want to stay home and read a book...
...Jokey mayors used to be all the rage in American cities. I remember Mayor William Schaefer of Baltimore jumping into the seal pool of the National Aquarium to fulfill his promise of what he'd do if the building did not open on schedule. Mayor Schaefer was a character. Mayor Edward Koch of New York was also a character. He once said he wasn't interested in running for Governor because there weren't any decent Chinese restaurants in Albany--a perfect mayor-as-character joke that turned less funny when he decided to run for Governor. In those days...
Both the music and the words on Little Plastic Castle seem unfettered and fluid. There's a jokey, poetry-slam freedom to DiFranco's lyrics here that is reminiscent of some of Bob Dylan's freewheelin', socially conscious early work. In one song, Fuel, DiFranco starts off with a pointed political observation--"They were digging a new foundation in Manhattan/ and they discovered a slave cemetery there/ may their souls rest easy now that lynching is frowned upon/ and we've moved on to the electric chair"--and then shifts easily to an image of digging deeper to uncover cultural...
...Calm, relaxed, and even jokey, Clinton stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Tony Blair and issued all the usual denials: "I never asked anyone to do anything but tell the truth"; "This investigation is going on, and you know what the rules for it are." Knowing that wasn't enough, he also threw some meat off the wagon to the baying hounds by alluding again to that right-wing conspiracy: "If someone is leaking unlawfully out of a grand jury proceeding," he added, "that's a different story...
...1960s, the couple's popularity waned. Having spent lavishly, Sonny & Cher were broke in 1969, so Bono remade them into a nightclub act of kitsch hippiedom. By 1971 they were starring in the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, the CBS variety show that brought a jokey, mass-market, safe feminism to TV as Sonny played emasculated buffoon to Cher's smart aleck. It was all his idea. As Cher said during her astonishing funeral oration last week, "He had the confidence to be the butt of the joke because he created the joke." But he was also in charge...