Word: joking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gather that you have been surprised by the reaction this piece has stirred. Perhaps it will help if I explain my own attitude toward it and what I consider to be your insensitivity in allowing, it to be printed. Any joke when repeated too often becomes stale. When it is directed at particular groups of people over and over again, it begins to pick up in hostility what it loses in humor. When the groups of people at which the joke is aimed also are the targets of actual (not merely verbal) forms of discrimination, then it becomes offensive...
...life." Perhaps. But few similarly committed public figures have succeeded as well as he. His attributes are many and formidable. The imposing intelligence and intimidating physique are obvious. His facility for understated sarcasm makes him a dangerous opponent on the podium or editorial page. Like Henry Kissinger, Galbraith can joke about his self-confidence without sinking in false modesty. Moreover, he is a diligent and productive worker...
Bernstein, however, feels that the varsity letter just complements the letter grades she's received so far. "The really great think is that Harvard softball is no longer taken as a joke. Even as a club-sport we were out there to play and excel, as ourselves, as athletes; but most important as a team. We did that; all the varsity status does is propel our position to another level...
...spoke. Buchwald appeared, along with the inevitable cigar, and Anderson collared him and asked for a joke he could use to open his speech later that evening...
Ulysses Grant in his throwaway lines-in his throwaway life-kept trying to get people to see the colossal sick joke. All you do is take the nicest guy on the block, and knowing he is not good for much else, let him act on the bald fact that war means killing the guy on the other side . . . Then, all this man has to do is keep the fact in mind all the way to Appomattox...