Word: joking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...know--anything? Barely 14 years old, I was constantly going on diets myself, trying to lose those extra pounds so that I could keep modeling after school and on weekends. I hardly paid attention to what he was saying, brushing it off as a joke. If anything, I was too concerned with my own body at the time to worry about...
...sudden inflation of Whitewater from a nuisance into a crisis, Administration officials insisted, was due more to their colleagues' stupidity than to any new evidence of misdeeds. The President said it was all a problem of perception. Desperate to move on, they could even joke about it; adviser Bruce Lindsey cracked that Whitewater was the site of the future Clinton presidential library. But the greatest perceptual change had implications far beyond Whitewater and its tributaries: the President's wife, the most unaccountable member of any Administration, was being called to account for her actions...
...without losing sight of the fact that some windbags blow up with a bang. "Bruce is a first-rate journalist whose work has a witty bite to it," says assistant managing editor Jim Kelly. "He lets the irony and absurdity grow out of the news, instead of just imposing jokes on what happened last week." And like the Supreme Court, which last week paid unanimous tribute to the usefulness of parody, he also knows that humor is an essential part of the national discourse. "A good joke can shed light on events," says Handy. "If it's funny...
...apart after all: "I feel like candy/I'll go out on the street and make some money/That was just a joke/About the money:/You're going to pay me with your life." That's the chorus: it comes around at least three times, and by the third time the "joke" has become a real threat. It's not a threat of literal violence at all, but the threat that the girl who is singing is already romantically enmeshed in a compromising situation with the boy she's addressing. It's a scary prospect, and one the song paints...
...figure out the bizarre and rather sadistic plot twist. But whatever you do, don't think about the movie when it's over--or you'll realize that what seemed like a fun way to flow off an afternoon is really a grossly flawed attempt to milk a single joke for far too long...