Word: joking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...never quite realize that a job's essence is its relationship to society at large. What do ironworkers think about? How does their community work? Whenever Cherry fears his subjects are getting too much like automatons with accents he reverts to a "fun" incident--the workers playing a joke on an apprentice named Peter the Putrid Punk, or collecting on a girder to watch the hookers go by on Sixth Avenue. But the games are usually just buddies horsing around--not iron-workers--and they seem artificially imposed, stuck in to jazz up the plodding descriptions of the work...
Some of The Laughingstock's targets, like Kissinger's foreign policy and forced busing, for example, are serious enough to demand a high level of wit and political awareness in their treatment, instead of one-joke situations that never delve beneath the surface lies, not to mention the deeper ones. Some of the other things The Laughingstock makes fun of--French chanteuses, mystical gurus, and throwing up, for example--are on a completely different level but get the same treatment. The Laughingstock never makes more than one satirical point per situation, and that one isn't always so hot. Kissinger...
Even a more promising comic situation than this--Ford's advisors instructing him in the basics of economic theory--is reduced to a single, simple joke. Three people play different sectors of the economy and hand over play-money to each other. Predictably, the business sector gets it all and the whole thing winds up being slightly less funny than an Ec 10 lecture. Some skits are more successful, but don't seem particularly original--the one about the guru who celebrates "the banal and the obvious" sounds a lot like the National Lampoon's Craig Baker series, for example...
...Dukakis attempt to make a political scandal out of a $40,000 loan to Sargent from his wife flopped. Sargent passed it off as a joke and the press has generally condemned Dukakis's charge as scandal-mongering...
...Ramsey Clark. Ever since he resigned as U.S. Attorney General in the Johnson Administration, Clark has sought out one liberal cause after another. He has championed Eskimos and Indians, the Berrigan brothers and the Attica rebels, New York Detective Frank Serpico and vanishing wildlife. There is a joke on the liberal cocktail circuit that if Clark were told that the "nauga" was an endangered species, he would demand a ban on the sale of Naugahyde furniture. He seemed to be too much of a causemonger for even cause-prone New Yorkers, and his candidacy was laughed off. Then he handily...