Word: joking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Millionaire were rerunning in life. "Congratulations," said the telephone caller from Chicago, "you have just been awarded $248,000 over five years with no strings attached." Recalls Harvard Psychiatrist and Author Robert Coles, 51: "My wife and kids thought it was a joke...
Coles and 20 other scholars and artists learned last week that the giveaway was not a joke but a new talent search begun by Chicago's John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Its aim: finding creative people and helping them to make "discoveries or other significant contributions to society." Neither Coles nor any other recipient had applied for the MacArthur Prize fellowship. Nor could they have done so, since foundation policy bars anyone from nominating himself. Instead, recipients were chosen without their knowledge by a secret committee of more than 100 members drawn from the arts and sciences...
Beneath the deft mimicry is the cultural critic's remove from his subject and his audience. This is not new. All humor is a detached analysis, an autopsy of the society's dreams and demons. As the sit-down iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche put it, "A joke is an epitaph on an emotion." The post-funny comics go a step further by taking the ironist's step back. By making fun of the obsequiousness and desperation found in the lower circles of show-business purgatory, they are chiseling epitaphs on epitaphs. They haunt cemeteries of frayed hopes...
...ultimately more subversive radical professor of post-funny comedy. Says Brooks, who was born Albert Einstein, son of the dialect comedian Parkyakarkus: "Life is so bizarre anyway, the slightest twist can make it really funny." Brooks' twist is so slight, so deft, that many may not get the joke. In 1975 he and Harry Shearer wrote and produced A Star Is Bought, a record album ostensibly designed to "sell" Albert Brooks to various radio audiences. There was a patriotic monologue for country stations, a novelty record for the Top-40 market, a vocal version of Bolero, a Jack Benny...
...dominant mode, but not now. Where Rockpile elevates old tunes like Fats Domino's "I Hear You Knocking" to new fame, the Rumour drags down Manfred Mann's "I Think It's Gonna Work Out Fine" into the dust heap. The tackiness of the album cover is a joke, but one that will hurt them in this country; Americans don't like being told flat out that they're stupid consumers. The music of the Rumour and Rockpile rockseven more in concert, but is drowned out by the record industry's find-me-something-new blues...