Word: joking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bumped along in the lower ranks of American presidencies. One 1962 poll of American historians and political scientists placed him rather degradingly in the spot between Andrew Johnson and Chester A. Arthur: a mediocre and listless ex-soldier summoned from the links. Ike's sarcastic contemporaries liked to joke about "the bland leading the bland," about his goofy grin and the stack of Zane Grey westerns on his night table. He was forever playing golf or fishing, or otherwise treating the White House, they said, as a pleasant retirement home. And there was Ike's language, those famously...
...hands claw at his throat. He may be trying to loosen his tie, but it looks as if he is trying to strangle himself. The whole performance is a screwball incarnation of the comedian's deepest nightmare: flop sweat, the purgatorial feeling of bombing out, when every joke falls like a barbell and the only laughs come when you introduce the band. Other guys fight their way past flop sweat, or cool it out. For Rodney Dangerfield, cool is a dial on a Fedders. He sets fear on parade, and all its consequences are his best punch lines...
...signature line-"I don't get no respect"-cuts right to everyone's soul. Indeed, Dangerfield's best comedy is based on a futile lashing out against misery, often sexual and always social. "Comedy is essentially mood, not a series of one-liners," Dangerfield says. "Every joke is a complete story." The way he tells one, the audience can often see a whole life in a setup, and a fate in a punch line. "During sex my wife wants to talk to me," he confesses, then adds: "The other night she called me from a hotel...
...ordeal. He announced before any of the rest and suffered under the personal attack of New Hampshire's sulfurous newspaper publisher William Loeb, who accused the Congressman of sexual excess and heavy drinking. Says Crane of his long campaign: "It's like the old moron joke about the kid who was hitting himself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you quit. I told the folks back home everyone ought to do this once in his life, ideally as early on as possible, because every day after it's over...
They say they appreciate nearly anyone who has the guts to stand up and tell jokes. But they can't stand canned humor. "You know, you're watching a movie and you can tell: 500 feet to the joke, 250 feet to the joke, 100 feet to the joke, The Joke, You just passed the joke...