When I die, my money's not gonna come with me. My movies will live on for people to judge what I was as a person. I just want to stay curious. - Interview for London's Sunday Telegraph magazine, November 2007
If you stick a stock of liquor in your locker, It is slick to stick a lock upon your stock. Or some joker who is slicker, Will trick you of your liquor, If you fail to lock your liquor with a lock.
A "practical joker" deserves applause for his wit according to its quality. Bastinado is about right. For exceptional wit one might grant keelhauling. But staking him out on an anthill should be reserved for the very wittiest. -- Lazarus Long
Holy Dilemma! Is this the end for the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder? Will the Joker and the Riddler have the last laugh? Tune in again tomorrow: same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.
In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not) upon the joker's heart. The joker rapped it with his own, took a nimble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing attitude, with one of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out. A joker of an extremely, not to say wolfishly practical character, he looked, under those circumstances.
Oh! jolly is the gale, And a joker is the whale, A' flourishin' his tail,-- Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.
"Put it on, put it on," said the other. "Call wine, wine; and finish there." With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker's dress, such as it was--quite deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on his account; and then recrossed the road and entered the wine-shop.
Well, what do you think? That muleheaded old fool wouldn't give in _then_! Indeed he wouldn't. Said it warn't no fair test. Said his brother William was the cussedest joker in the world, and hadn't tried to write_he_ see William was going to play one of his jokes the minute he put the pen to paper. And so he warmed up and went warbling and warbling right along till he was actuly beginning to believe what he was saying _himself_; but pretty soon the new gentleman broke in, and says:
There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke, he called to him across the way:
_Joker Hearts._--Here the deuce of hearts is discarded, and an extra card, called the joker, takes its place, ranking in value between ten and knave. It cannot be thrown away, excepting when hearts are led and an ace or court card is played, though if an opponent discards the ace or a court card of hearts, then the holder of the joker may discard it. The joker is usually considered worth five chips, which are either paid into the pool or to the player who succeeds in discarding the joker. Entry: HEARTS
EUCHRE, a game of cards. The name is supposed by some to be a corruption of _écarté_, to which game it bears some resemblance; others connect it with the Ger. _Juchs_ or _Jux_, a joke, owing to the presence in the pack, or "deck," of a special card called "the joker"; but neither derivation is quite satisfactory. The "deck" consists of 32 cards, all cards between the seven and ace being rejected from an ordinary pack. Sometimes the sevens and eights are rejected as well. The "joker" is the best card, i.e. the highest trump. Second in value is the "right bower" (from Dutch _boer_, farmer, the name of the knave), or knave of trumps; third is the "left bower," the knave of the other suit of the same colour as the right bower, also a trump: then follow ace, king, queen, &c., in order. Thus if spades are trumps the order is (1) the joker, (2) knave of spades, (3) knave of clubs, (4) ace of spades, &c. The joker, however, is not always used. When it is, the game is called "railroad" euchre. In suits not trumps the cards rank as at whist. Euchre can be played by two, three or four persons. In the cut for deal, the highest card deals, the knave being the highest and the ace the next best card. The dealer gives five cards to each person, two each and then three each, or vice versa: when all have received their cards the next card in the pack is turned up for trumps. Entry: EUCHRE
In comedy, the efforts of the scholars of the Italian Renaissance for a time went side by side with the progress of the popular entertainments noticed above. While the _contrasti_ of the close of the 15th and of the 16th century were disputations between pairs of abstract or allegorical figures, in the _frottola_ human types take the place of abstractions, and more than two characters appear. The _farsa_ (a name used of a wide variety of entertainments) was still under medieval influences, and in this popular form Alione of Asti (soon after 1500) was specially productive. To these popular diversions a new literary as well as social significance was given by the Neapolitan court-poet Sannazaro (c. 1492); about the same time a _capitano valoroso_, Venturino of Pesara, first brought on the modern stage the _capitano glorioso_ or _spavente_, the military braggart, who owed his origin both to Plautus[25] and to the Spanish officers who abounded in the Italy of those days. The popular character-comedy, a relic of the ancient _Atellanae_, likewise took a new lease of life--and this in a double form. The _improvised_ comedy (_commedia a soggetto_) was now as a rule performed by professional actors, members of a _craft_, and was thence called the _commedia dell' arte_, which is said to have been invented by Francesco (called Terenziano) Cherea, the favourite player of Leo X. Its scenes, still unwritten except in skeleton (_scenario_), were connected together by the ligatures or links (_lazzi_) of the _arlecchino_, the descendant of the ancient Roman _sannio_ (whence our _zany_). Harlequin's summit of glory was probably reached early in the 17th century, when he was ennobled in the person of Cecchino by the emperor Matthias; of Cecchino's successors, Zaccagnino and Truffaldino, we read that "they shut the door in Italy to good harlequins." Distinct from this growth is that of the _masked_ comedy, the action of which was chiefly carried on by certain typical figures in masks, speaking in local dialects,[26] but which was not improvised, and indeed from the nature of the case hardly could have been. Its inventor was A. Beolco of Padua, who called himself Ruzzante (joker), and is memorable under that name as the first actor-playwright--a combination of extreme significance for the history of the modern stage. He published six comedies in various dialects, including the Greek of the day (1530). This was the masked comedy to which the Italians so tenaciously clung, and in which, as all their own and imitable by no other nation, they took so great a pride that even Goldoni was unable to overthrow it. Improvisation and burlesque, alike abominable to comedy proper, were inseparable from the species. Entry: 11
The presence of a base contagious cloud is painfully felt in the so-called humorous literature of England till the 18th century. The reader who does not sometimes wonder whether humour in the mouths of English writers of that period did not stand for maniacal tricks, horse-play, and the foul names of foul things, material and moral, must be very determined to prove himself a whole-hearted admirer of the ancient literature. Addison, who did much to clean it of mere nastiness, gives an excellent example of the base use of the word in his day. In Number 371 of the _Spectator_ he introduces an example of the "sort of men called Whims and Humourists." It is the delight of this person to play practical jokes on his guests. He is proud when "he has packed together a set of oglers" who had "an unlucky cast in the eye," or has filled his table with stammerers. The humorist, in fact, was a mere practical joker, who was very properly answered by a challenge from a military gentleman of peppery temper. Indeed, the pump and a horse-whip would appear to have been the only effective forms of criticism on the prevalent humour and humours of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. But the pump and the horse-whip were themselves humours. Carlo Buffone in Jonson's play is put "out of his humour" by the counter humour of Signor Puntarvolo, who knocks him down and gags him with candle wax. The brutal pranks of Fanny Burney's Captain Mirvan, who belongs to the earlier part of the 18th century, were meant for humour, and were accepted as such. Examples might easily be multiplied. A briefer and also a more convincing method of demonstration is to take the deliberate judgment of a great authority. No writer of the 18th century possessed a finer sense of humour in the noble meaning than Goldsmith. What did he understand the word to mean? Not what he himself wrote when he created Dr Primrose. We have his express testimony in the 9th chapter of _The Present State of Polite Learning_. Goldsmith complains that "the critic, by demanding an impossibility from the comic poet, has, in effect, banished true comedy from the stage." This he has done by banning "low" subjects, and by proscribing "the comic or satirical muse from every walk but high life, which, though abounding in fools as well as the humbler station, is by no means so fruitful in absurdity.... Absurdity is the poet's game, and good breeding is the nice concealment of absurdity. The truth is, the critic generally mistakes 'humour' for 'wit,' which is a very different excellence; wit raises human nature above its level; humour acts a contrary part, and equally depresses it. To expect exalted humour is a contradiction in terms.... The poet, therefore, must place the object he would have the subject of humour in a state of inferiority; in other words, the subject of humour must be _low_." Entry: A