Word: joking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...nuclear nonproliferation and strikes. Also, he faces added worries because: 1) the majority of the voters rejected him, 2) he must live up to his promises of a modern Shangrila, and 3) he must accomplish all this with a fresh Cabinet and a Vice President who is the biggest joke in the history of American politics. Due to these factors, Richard Nixon should become the most prayed-for President in our nation's history...
...tensely at the table that was the focus of the sequence, fiddling with a fork, making conversation with two other actors, and once breaking into a high, put-on Southern accent. The few times that Hoffman lingered at the table to make a time-killing joke, he addressed it to the table at large, not to Mia; except when the action called for it, he never even looked at her. Obviously?and very tentatively?they were getting to know each other, sizing each other up both in the plot and in reality...
Today, most of Stone's 3,500 salesmen memorize his sales pitch down to the last pause and wisecrack. Standard joke: "Why, we even pay off if your heart is broken." Following a technique that Stone developed, the salesmen walk through an office building from top to bottom, knocking on doors trying to sell everyone inside. The salesmen call this method "cold canvassing"; Stone predictably terms it "gold canvassing...
Everybody knows that somebody listening to a joke is not really listening; he is impatiently awaiting his turn to tell a joke of his own. Everybody knows that husbands give half an ear to the discourse of their wives-and vice versa. Why do these highly disciplined attempts at human dialogue fail? The reason, says Abraham Kaplan, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, is that they are not really dialogues at all. Before a conference on human and animal communication at Minnesota's Gustavus Adolphus College this month, Kaplan introduced his own word for all those...
...just to the other, but listening to oneself. This rare and wondrous event Kaplan calls "communion" instead of communication. "It seems to me impossible," he says, "to teach unless you are learning. You cannot really talk unless you are listening." The student is also the professor; the joke teller should also be part of the audience. To Kaplan, there is nothing lonelier than two humans involved in a duologue-and nothing more marvelous than two genuinely engaged listeners. "If we didn't search so hard for our own identities but occupied ourselves with the other, we might find precisely...