Word: joking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...team, they are remarkably free from quarrels, but they are not close friends. They waste few words on the job, generally talking to each other in technological jargon. Once in a while, Mike Collins cracks a joke. Once in a longer while, Neil Armstrong flashes a fleeting smile. After work, they go their separate ways. It may be true, Aldrin admits, that they have all been somewhat dehumanized by what he calls "the treadmill" of the space program...
...were bagged. There were other air battles as well; one a brief fracas near the southern tip of Sinai in which, according to Israel, two Egyptian MIG-21s were downed. The rain of Arab aircraft, in fact, stirred a fresh upsurge of cockiness in Israel, and a favorite 1967 joke made the rounds once more. "It's easy to be an Arab pilot. All he has to learn is how to get up into the air; our pilots get him down again...
...same time, he repeatedly ignored the expressed wishes of the faculty. When the college's Grievance and Disciplinary Action Panel, made up of faculty members, found him guilty on four charges and demanded his replacement, Hayakawa made a joke of the whole thing. The panel's findings were addressed to the president, so Hayakawa, in his capacity as acting president, wrote himself an elaborately sarcastic letter, chiding himself for carrying out what he believed to be his duty...
...thing some stability. In short, this juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic pinpoints the mentality of a people who have survived politics (both their side's and the other's) only because they have grown accustomed to treating life and all it brings as, at best, a blasphemous joke. As The Hostage makes clear, even death--however black--has its own peculiar humor...
Author Charyn knows how to make a pratfall out of a pitfall, how to convert sordid realism into a sort of surrealism. The residual moral is as harrowing as the punch line of a good black-humor joke is meant to be-what cruelly absurd ends men are capable of reaching simply by being cool and reasonable...