Word: joking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After a recent speech in Washington, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill was asked which was harder: negotiating with Pyongyang or trying to forge a coherent North Korea policy within the Bush Administration. Hill laughed, but it was no joke. More than five years and one North Korean nuclear test after George W. Bush said he "loathed" Kim Jong Il, the U.S. stance toward Pyongyang has now flip-flopped. No longer is Washington trying to isolate the dictator's rogue regime. Instead, on March 5 and 6 Hill held talks with the North's Vice Foreign Minister...
...dispensers in Canaday, Weld, and Greenough last spring measures 2 inches by 2 inches and is about a quarter-inch thick. Usually made of latex or occasionally polyurethane, the modern condom can stretch to 800 percent its normal size, if necessary—both a prophylactic and a practical joke waiting to happen. As a method of birth control, it boasts a 98 percent success rate, and when used to protect against STDs, one incurs less than a quarter of the risk one might incur through unprotected sex. As prophylactics go, condoms are pretty solid, not as foolproof as abstinence...
Gender parity takes more than a condom, a club, or a career. It’s a consciousness. Many undergraduates can relate stories of being in mixed company, hearing a man tell a misogynist joke, and feeling compelled to laugh along rather than risk making anyone uncomfortable. Caring about women’s issues doesn’t jibe with the ironically detached Harvard woman of today, who wants everyone to stop being all sensitive, so nobody gets angry—or worse, starts acting like some kind of feminist or something...
What the Bad People misunderstand is that the gay-related humor I share with some of my close male heterosexual friends has far more to do with the enjoyment of a good joke than with homophobia. It goes without saying, of course, that we are “post-homophobic” (or—and here I must give credit to blockmate Jeremy Hartman—“PoHoMoPho”). Simply put, for me it is a given that the value my straight-boy friends place on me has fundamentally nothing to do with my being...
...that’s the thread in post-hate humor, whether it’s post-homophobia, post-racism, post-anything-not-very-nice. So within post-homophobia, for instance, is the implicit assumption that the teller of the joke (and the audience, too) is not homophobic, which means the joke teller is free to trot out every formerly “offensive” stereotype or sentiment in the service of a good joke...