Word: joking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Brian Moore has told an old-maid joke, if it is realized that the point of the spinster joke is human cruelty-and that none sees the point more clearly than the spinster. There are many conspirators against the old maid. The first is Belfast, "drab facades of the buildings proclaiming the virtues of trade, hard dealing and Presbyterian righteousness," with "the dour Ulster burghers walking proudly among these monuments to their mediocrity...
...Browning chose Brahms's Concerto No. 2 for his big selection, playing it stunningly, and he was the first finalist to bring order out of the Defossez chaos. Czajkowski reminded observers of Chopin (he is attractive to women and prefers composing to playing) and amused them with his jokes. But his playing was no joke to his intense competitors...
...Truth or Consequences last week brought this hoary Greek joke up to date with a sequence about a vacuum-cleaner salesman who innocently calls on a housewife, is interrupted in mid-spiel by the arrival of the husband, and almost instantly finds himself in the center of a family quarrel. The irate husband throws his wife onto a sofa, then knocks her down against a table; she retaliates by belting him with a vase and breaking a chair over his head. While the salesman, cowering over his vacuum-cleaner attachments, quavers: "You shouldn't do that!" husband and wife...
...about Jonathan Kozol's little piece of satanism is that he has given his people wonderful names: Brubeck, Euclid, Castrato. The poetry in the issue is almost uniformly hard to remember. In the best of the lot, Epitaph for a Young Athlete, F. L. Seidel clothes his single small joke in pretentious language. While the only image of David Ferry's The Late Hour Poem is more ludicrous than striking, Nina Castelli's The Coquette concludes, with some truth for the poem, "What use to anyone is it,/My cutting virtue, and my wit?" The rest of the poetry consists...
There is only one joke to the movie, but it is a funny one. Director Frederico Fellini is an adept at catching his characters at their ridiculousest to make it funnier. Nine-tenths of the movie is corn, and all of it is a pleasure to watch. There is also a short concerning "Inside the Kinsey Report" which is not half so amusing, and there is another miscellaneous short...