Word: joking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Polemic & Chuckle. Author Guareschi regards Communism as a formidable evil, but at the grass-roots level he treats it as more of a joke-tricky, unpredictable, often violent and sometimes hurtful, but essentially a joke perpetrated by clumsy bunglers who do not know that the laugh is on them. This may be both oversimplification and underestimation, but in Guareschi's hands the theory bears up entertainingly well. Communists hate to be spoofed. Guareschi, in his halfway perch between angry polemic and soft chuckle, makes fun of them. Peppone, for example, advises Comrade Lungo not to be alarmed because...
...face with an inquiring, anxious air, as though it were sniffing for some good thing in the wind; the eyes, dark, full and deeply set, are penetrating, but full of an expression which almost amounts to tenderness . . . One would say that, although the mouth was made to enjoy a joke, it could also utter the severest sentence which the head could dictate, but that Mr. Lincoln would be ever more willing to temper justice with mercy . . ." That is the way Foreign Correspondent William Howard Russell sketched President Lincoln in 1861. It was this extraordinary gift for writing closeups...
Since the major constitutional guarantee, habeas corpus, had been no more than a poor joke for weeks in police-ridden Guatemala, the decree's biggest effect was on the opposition press. Cables were censored, chiefly for news of arrests and escapes into asylum; local papers-except the brashly Communist Tribuna Popular-were splashed with white space where items had been killed...
...Final Test. A British joke about cricket, well told; with Robert Morley (TIME...
...Quiet Life. In the years since he married Actress Bacall, Bogart has not abandoned his interest in the practical joke and the convivial glass, or his feeling that there are nights when a man owes it to himself to stay up until dawn. But for all that, he leads an astonishingly quiet life. He reads voluminously, plays chess, and engages his wife at Scrabble. He often takes afternoon naps and tries hard, when he is working, to be in bed and asleep...