Word: joking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...attempt to elbow Marshal Tito into line in 1948 only forced the Yugoslavian Communist leader to turn to the West for trade-and drove him further from the Stalinist camp. The Organization of African Unity's solemn pledge to boycott all South African goods has been a joke: Zambia gets at least half its consumer products from Johannesburg, and the government-owned airline of leftist Mali serves South African oranges to its passengers...
...dried up cash, and consumers have little to spend. Christmas shopping is the slowest in memory. Worse still is the spreading fear that all the foreign money means that Brazil is losing its national identity. American advisers are so much in evidence at the economic ministry that Brazilians bitterly joke that more English than Portuguese is spoken there. Some nationalists consider Roberto Campos so pro-U.S. that they commonly Americanize his name to Bobby Fields...
Actually, there is no mystery here. Bennett Alfred Cerf, 68, is an open book. Board chairman of Random House, he is the nation's best-known book publisher-better known than many of the authors he serves. He is also perpetrator of a syndicated joke column and author of 21 joke and riddle books that have sold more than 5,000,000 copies, and a longtime panelist on that somewhat tiresome but seemingly indestructible TV parlor game, What's My Line? Wherever he goes, autograph hounds bark at his heels. Little ol|i ladies leap out of dark...
Some of Cerfs competitors readily suggest that he is a creature of his own publicity, a quipster who has parlayed his way into the publishing pantheon through the good offices of television and Joe Miller's joke book. "Bennett," says one fellow publisher, "is not an intellectual. He's not a literary man. He's an entrepreneur, an impresario." But that is only the surface of Cerf. Explains Epstein: "Bennett runs Random House as a conservative branch of show business. The company is vulgar to a degree. But what makes the difference with Bennett is how important...
...real joke is that suddenly social scientists have decided that the government ought to give them a colossal laboratory -- the military establishment and the attendant Selective Service System. And with pressure for draft reform coming from the most respectable places, they just might...