Word: joking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Updike embraces other contrasts. He is unfailingly receptive and fair to the works of other writers. His frequent book reviews in The New Yorker are models of critical generosity. Yet he is also fiercely competitive. He can joke about this side of his character. After moving his thousands of books into the new house last May, he found that he still had not built enough space to shelve them all. "I had to put my American contemporaries down in the cellar," he recalls...
...plexioned 6-ft. 4-in. jowly Kohl is folksy, gregarious and a devout Roman Catholic. In the Bundestag, Schmidt is always poised and formal. Kohl, on the other hand, has frequently been seen sitting on the opposition benches roaring with laughter, as if parliamentary business were some huge joke. Kohl is fond of saying that "my strength is that people are ready to buy a used car from me without testing...
...mayor's race, Koch topped Cuomo by a 55%-to-45% margin.) Upstaters turned out in heavy numbers to vote 2 to 1 for Cuomo. They were rankled by Koch's ill-advised interview with Playboy magazine earlier this year, in which he called rural life "a joke," and put off by his wisecracking city style...
...nightly monologue has evolved into a sequence of snappy asides that is virtually fail-safe. If the jokes hit home, fine. Carson will smile and bob his head and smooth his tie while the audience laughs. If the joke flies wide or falls flat, the audience will groan and Carson will look wounded, then drop some self-deprecating aside that, like a slow fuse, will finally ignite the gag. Dick Cavett, who worked for Carson as a writer, recalls that Carson "made a point of bombing and making it funny. Sometimes you'd write strictly for that...
...find it, strangely enough, only in the reports of his eccentricities. It is easier to visualize him making faces than walking in the door. I think only someone with no imagination can imagine him." One would like to read this as an equivalent to Mozart's A Musical Joke or dialogue from the theater of the absurd. In fact, the German-born author, 66, is best known as a painter and playwright with an intellectual kinship to Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco...