Word: wisecrack
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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American humor in its traditional forms -the wisecrack, the tall tale, the deadpan jape, the shaggy-dog story -has both resisted the official puritanism and made it all possible. For more than two centuries, from that subversive puritan Ben Franklin to the wryly theological Charles Schulz, the nation's humorists have operated as a tolerated underground culture. They have conspired to create a fantasy world where good Americans could be as shiftless as Charlie Chaplin's tramp, as cynical as W.C. Fields never-giving-a-sucker-an-even-break, as lecherous as Groucho Marx prowling a bedroom. American...
...become a compulsory part of the American footrace for happiness. There goes the rationale of the dirty joke-not to mention just about every other joke that originates in repression. Since Oh! Calcutta!, voyeurism has become something one buys tickets for. And instead of making a wisecrack against the system, one now throws a brick through the window of the Bank of America. Who needs laughs when everybody is doing his thing? Like a patient who has just finished analysis, the emancipated (at last!) American is inclined to regard his lack of humor as evidence of strength. Laughs are just...
Yugoslav Challenge. According to another wisecrack, first, second and third prizes will be awarded for the best jokes about the Lenin anniversary: 15, ten and five years' exile respectively in Shushen-skoye, the Siberian town to which Lenin was exiled under the Czar. Also making the rounds is the story of an elderly citizen who writes to his party committee for a new apartment, then to the Central Committee and finally to Lenin himself, but receives no answer. He goes to the Central Committee and asks to see Lenin, but is told by the Party Secretary that Lenin died...
...They sing the national anthem at football games-and mean it." Your wisecrack is contemptible...