Word: joking
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Impractical Joke. In Los Angeles, Thomas J. Gant didn't see anything to laugh at when Thurman Lee Dawson gave him an outsized hotfoot with lighter fluid: he shot the prankster dead; the court called it justifiable homicide...
...reminiscent of the lead story in the last issue. Both are tales of neurotic young men hounded by fear. While the first attempt was confused and shadowy, the new story, dealing with three murky characters who hound a Greenwich Village habitue back to his Albany home for a practical joke, has a basis in realistic motives and comprehensible feelings. The mounting tension is skilfully underwritten, and the success of the work is dependent on the right refusal of the author to employ any of the tricks of emotional writing...
...years he made 15,000,000. The Model T became a legend; it became the hero of 10? joke books. Ford's own favorite joke was the one about the gravedigger who was asked why he was digging such an enormous hole. "They're going to bury this fellow with his Ford," the gravedigger explained. "He said it had pulled him out of every other hole, it would pull him out of this one." The Tin Lizzie rattled and banged across the country. It had to have roads. Roads were built. It had to have gas. Gas pumps...
Many a U.S. citizen, stoutly convinced that only a Briton could laugh at a British joke, was unknowingly doing it himself last week. A pantomime comic strip called Louie, a month after its U.S. invasion, was already in 28 newspapers, including the Milwaukee Journal, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Oakland Tribune...
Surrealist pictures sometimes leave gallery-goers with the uneasy suspicion that the joke is on them. Last week a surrealist one-man show in Manhattan gave onlookers the pleasure of being in on the laughs. The paintings, by a dour little Belgian named René Magritte, have Salvador Dali's technical perfection but none of Dali's tiresome bag of Freudian tricks. Sample Magritte subjects: a fountain-as cool and wet-looking as the real thing-which spouts crystal mirrors, crowns, hands and cornucopias; a cigar box puffing a cigar; a door, set up against the sky, opening...