Word: joking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Ohio, after police caught Eugene Vernon, 15, with $91 of the $100 he had stolen in a candy store by brandishing a pistol and threatening, "Give me every cent in that register or I'll blow your head off," he offered a conditional surrender: "It was all a joke, fellows. I'm willing to forget...
...fantasy that has inspired writers since literature began; its space-time worlds and grisly "Things" are cousins to Homer's magical islands of monsters. But the old fictions made little pretense of being scientific (when Jonathan Swift gave Mars two satellites, he had little idea that his little joke would be proved true in the following century). Only with the great Jules Verne (1828-1905) did fantasy make a serious effort to build upon physics and mathematics...
...pulpiteers is Britain's ex-Hungarian, ex-Communist Arthur Koestler, whose brilliant contribution to the campaign for the abolition of hanging in Britain has been published in the U.S. To Koestler (who languished for months under sentence of death in a Franco prison), hanging is no joke. To Dublin's Brendan Behan...
Another episode (1921), drawn from Lady Gregory's one-act play The Rising of the Moon, is tinged with macabre humor that bids to be incredible. Perhaps only the Irish themselves can see the joke in a gallows. During Ireland's Black and Tan ordeal of rebellion "troubles" in 1921, a horde of citizens, ostensibly thumbing their beads, conspire to rescue a Condemned young revolutionary from his British jailers. Wearing saucy high heels under their false habits, two fake nuns thoroughly enjoy their patriotic lark at the death cell, wink, exchange secret smiles and repress girlish giggles while...
...dramatic masterpiece; it is certainly not that. When you come right down to it, there is hardly any plot at all; and such tenuous plot as there is does not even begin until three quarters of an hour have passed--the first 45 minutes constitute one long extended joke, but what a wonderful joke...