Word: joking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...taxpayers think of take-home pay as their income and regard their withheld tax money, which they never see, as not their own. If we all had to sit down and go through the bloodletting of writing a check to the IRS once a year, we would no longer joke about $9,000 screws for fighter planes...
Breathed does have a good sense of self and a good sense of self vs. Trudeau. He tries, somewhat gingerly, to joke about his relationship with his top-box predecessor. In one example. Bloom County star Milo Bloom dreams of being a syndicated cartoonist thrown into the dungeon for missed deadlines, where he is hung on the wall in chains next to a bearded prisoner. The bearded prisoner jokes that he has been in the cellar for nine months, whereupon Milo says "nine months? Wait a minute. Gary Trudeau?...Mum's the word." Nor does Breathed hold back from poking...
Wilson manages to make most of the minor characters both real and fun. Giles' sister Margaret and her husband Monty are a sketch of the English public school house-master and his wife, but since they know that they are, a bit of realism manages to creep into the joke. Louise's mother, whom we meet only briefly, cheers characters and reader alike, combining dishpan-hands and a low-class accent with friendliness and a talent for the piano that she even reaches out to a blind...
...observers claimed that the Herald went soft. His powers were divided between Publisher Richard Capen, 49, who favors a less accusatory approach, and Executive Editor Heath Meriwether, 40, who spends much of his time discussing journalistic ethics in columns and at public meetings. Coverage is increasingly featurish; staff members joke that they sometimes produce "Jell-O journalism," with the main point of a story buried beneath paragraphs of scene setting...
...Linney, who also teaches writing, is obviously speaking from the heart here. Laughing Stock's other short plays are slighter: an anecdote about death and telephones and a shaggy-dog story about an old woman's discovery that her 70-year marriage was founded on a sly joke. But they too are marked by Linney's singular talent for stating wild ideas with high, simplifying intelligence and for drawing deft portraits of the half mad in which not a line is misplaced or wasted...