Word: joking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...majority of those with HIV outside the U.S. and Europe, the cost of the new "cocktail" treatments seems a cruel joke. The average Kenyan would exhaust his annual income in less than a week on the regimen. In India, where the government imposes 100% to 150% customs duty on pharmaceuticals brought from overseas, even a two-drug treatment can run to $3,500 a month, or more than 75 times the monthly earnings of poor laborers, who are the prime victims of the disease. "The new drugs will help the yuppies of the world," says Thailand's Mechai Viravaidya...
...family in the White House to the gang in Las Vegas, to the dysfunctional bunch living in a trailer near a small Kansas town, are presented as entirely worthy of zapping; they are all either too dumb or too self-absorbed to warrant salvation. Indeed, the big, slowly dawning joke in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! is that, unlike Independence Day or any other high-tech disaster movie, most of its vast and starry cast--headed by Jack Nicholson, in dual roles--is not going to be present when the final credits roll...
...Bill has a way of defusing tension with an offbeat joke," says his wife Barbara. For instance, at one point during discussions with the dour North Koreans over Hunziker's release, Richardson asked matter-of-factly, "Well, does he still have his fingernails?" The North Korean negotiators sat stunned for a second, then broke out laughing...
Some of the play's other thematic concerns--like Huml's grappling with human values--get pushed aside by this interpretative choice. The meaninglessness of the book on social theory which Huml dictates to Blanka is a vicious joke. Huml, in numerous monologues, carries on with a long string of empty statements: "Various people have at various times and in various circumstances various needs...and thus attach to various things various values." But because this production uses Huml's professional musings as nothing more than a gag, they quickly become tiresome...
...Mary downplayed the celebrity's appearance, saying: "[Wilhelm] is not involved in our campaign in any way, shape, or form. He was personally curious about campaign dynamics and electronic means of campaigning, [the uses of] e-mail [and the] web page. It was more a joke than anything...