Word: joking
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Importance of Being Earnest (by Oscar Wilde; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers) is 44 years old, and looks it. In a way this is a compliment, for most farces of 44 look twice their age. In Wilde's long stage joke of what happens when one young man invents an invalid friend and another young man invents a dissolute brother, there are still pleasant stretches. Lady Bracknell, "a monster without being a myth," is still an amusing snob. Miss Prism is still a funny old maid. And Wilde is still the most brilliant epigrammatist in the modern theatre...
...obliged to pay an Old Age Insurance Tax, in order to provide him with a theoretical Old Age Pension when he reaches the age of 65, and you are greeted with a wan, incredulous smile suggesting that you have made a creditable effort to perpetrate a rather poor joke. Yet this is exactly what a solemnly paternalistic government at Washington, probably unintentionally it is true, has decreed...
...Tellegen as well as the Propaganda Minister of Germany is gimpy little Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels. His carryings-on with the actresses on whom he must pass before they may appear on the German stage or screen are a joke as well as a scandal in the upper circles of Naziland...
...what is an entertaining but not very profound analysis, Mann describes Spanish non-intervention as a "transparent, disingenuous comedy," and terms it merely the first step in the cumulative, knavery which led to Berchtesgaden; the war scare, he says, was merely a cruel theatrical joke played on the masses of people, straining their nerves to the cracking point until they would overlook Czechoslovakia's betrayal in their gratitude for the avoidance...
...drawn by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper (see p. 20), a Catholic who found Germany intolerable. Meanwhile, Germany has become a nation of uniforms, goose-stepping to Hitler's tune, where boys of ten are taught to throw hand grenades, where women are regarded as breeding machines. Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have...