Word: joking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Great American Gaminess: "Are we going to stop publication of the bust measurements of movie stars? Perhaps we should stop using pictures of women at all. The idea that we can purge the American people by censorship is ridiculous. The favorite pastime of the American people is dirty jokes. The American people are more preoccupied with sex and more frightened of it than any others. We're just an obscene people." How does Wylie himself react to the national pastime? Yawned the savant of scatology: "I haven't heard a new dirty joke since I was twelve...
...pulses through every young heart. And it is a desire to become known (substitute: influential, accepted, wealthy), not merely to become, as an individual. It is all "outer-directed" becoming. And somehow, amidst it all, I feel the whole futile surge of energy deserves a great horse laugh. The joke is on somebody, or everybody...
Donald Hall deals in much the same coin in his commentary on Ezra Pound's almost circle of order, his "introvert sestina." One wonders whether the subject is worth the bother. Hall's joke provides its own criticism--"When we are bound to a tedious conversation,/We pay attention to the words themselves/Until they lose their sense.." Roger Moore's whimsical dealings with a similar subject turn out to be fun, but that is all. James Reiger's piece on the fall of the Civitas (of Troy or of God?) may be intended as humorous, but the subject does...
Since Kingsley Amis is an amiable satirist, Jim Dixon grins and bears the fact that he has attained status without achieving size. At worst, his is the venom of a reasonably contented rattlesnake. Under pressure, Dixon retreats to the practical joke as readily as Walter Mitty did to the hero-fantasy; when socially and emotionally discomfited, he makes faces-"his Edith Sitwell face," "his Sex Life in Ancient Rome face." At novel's end he tries to articulate his flashes of Angst in the pan during a drunken public lecture: "The point about Merrie England is that...
...Amis and the rest of his school part company, it will be because he is its only conscientious craftsman and its only notable wit. Even so, his humor travels no better than the average joke in Punch, and U.S. editions of Lucky Jim and a second novel. That Uncertain Feeling, have barely topped the 5,000 mark in sales. His fellow writers would probably fare even worse, for they write with a sloppy, cliche-ridden arrogance that has been absent from serious U.S. fiction since the heyday of James T. Farrell and the cult of social protest...