Word: joking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SPITTING IMAGE. Some plays sound distinctly unappetizing in conception but prove surprisingly palatable in realization. For anyone who can abide the idea, this work about two homosexuals who have a baby provides a consistently amusing evening, nursing its basic joke with taste and felicity. Sam Waterston and Walter McGinn turn in accomplished performances as Daddy One and Daddy Two in what is probably the first homosexual play with a happy ending...
...money home. Like all airmen, they do a lot of ground flying: when their ecclesiastical employers are out of earshot, they talk of bombing Lagos or heroically knocking down the Intruder by maneuvering a wingtip under his wingtip in the darkness and "flipping his ass to kingdom come." They joke grimly over the fact that their nightly flights mean only a trickle of food for Biafra's famished population. Then, as day begins to vanish over Sāo Tomé, dinner is served, the cargo trucks depart, the ancient aircraft cough into life, and the shuttle resumes...
...transporting oil in his tankers. "We are wondering why such a huge gift is made to our competitors," said Niarchos. Later, when Onassis was asked if he would ever join with Niarchos in a Greek project, he replied: "Don't you think that that is a bad-taste joke...
...real-life friend of Vian's, is amusingly satirized as Jean-Sol Partre, the cult idol who enters packed lecture halls on elephant back, crushing his waiting fans. But when Chick, Colin's friend, sacrifices everything, including his girl-friend Alise, in order to buy Partre's work, the joke turns grisly. Chloe dies from a water-lily growing in her lungs: this is both Vian's preposterous parody of the consumptive heroines who litter romantic tradition, and a real tragedy in the context of a world where orchids grow from the sidewalk. By the time Chloe dies, here eyes...
History, Jean-Paul Sartre once observed, is a bad joke played by the present upon the past. The perception has more to do with the inevitable bias of historians than with history itself. It emphasizes, however, the value of the practice that allowed a suitable interval to elapse before the present tried to judge the past. Today Presidents have taken to employing historians as personal aides, partly in the hope that they will be written up lovingly. Sometimes they are-witness Arthur Schlesinger's study of John F. Kennedy. And sometimes the joke is on the Chief Executive. Eric...