Word: joking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When a Johnson assistant once defended King's antiwar activities, L.B.J. exploded: "Goddammit, if only you could hear what that hypocritical preacher does sexually." The aide tried to joke. "Sounds good, Mr. President," he said. A huge grin appeared momentarily on Johnson's face, but he quickly caught it and returned to his threatening self...
...finally closed (by Duc's reckoning it had been suspended eight times, confiscated 285 times, the office bombed twice and burned once) he has been a political exile in Europe. "If I go home they will arrest me again," he says, grinning as though it is all a joke...
...Gruff Joke. Like many artists of the time, Dove also pursued the idea that colors could have symbolic meanings, that they could "stand for" specific sounds. A testament to Dove's interest in synesthesia was Fog Horns (1929), in which the sound of the signals is symbolized by concentric rings of paint growing in lightening tones of grayed pink from a dark center: the bell mouths of the horns, their peculiar resonance and the color of the fog are fused in one image...
...some years before, had done a number of "object-portraits"-Stieglitz as a camera and so forth), but the fascinating aspect today is how prophetic this small image is. No doubt Dove meant the folding inch-rule that runs round the portrait like a frame to be a gruff joke-how do you measure the fictional space of a painting? But that joke, 35 years later, would become one of the "issues" of American art and Jasper Johns would obsessively return to it. Of course, Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry is not necessarily a better assemblage because it predicts some part...
Like most contemporary humorists, Monty Python homes in wherever it spots a cliche so rotten it's ready to split open in an explosion of laughter. They take a line like "I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition" and turn it into a six-minute joke when Cardinal Fang bursts in shouting, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" and proceeds to torture his victims wih a comfy chair and a soft pillow. During the surfeit of Mary Queen of Scots a few years ago, Monty Python produced a skit that reduced the enigmatic Scotswoman's appeal to its formulaic minimum...