Keywords: Humour
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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EDUCATION
- Paulette Smythe
- 25 May 2018
15 Comments
I often feel I have the best job on the planet. Teaching English to adult refugees should be a daunting task. Yet these classes are especially warm and congenial places to be. Human beings at their most vulnerable possess an extraordinary fund of light and laughter despite, or perhaps because of, the darkness they have left behind.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
Tully is a funny film, with a serious core: a tribute to the labour of child rearing, a dissection of the substantial physical and emotional burden of this work, and a 'show-don't-tell' critique of the social norms that frequently sees that burden fall, still, primarily on women.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
The views of Kevin 'Bloody' Wilson and Rodney Rude can be summed up in the quote: 'The soft new generation of PC-wary comedians need to grow some balls.' There seems to be a sense that comedy isn't funny nowadays unless it's offensive. But it's more than possible to create comedy that avoids this. In fact, it can be better.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 11 April 2018
1 Comment
The commentary around the film's appropriation of Japanese culture has been sustained and substantial. At least these allusions are for the most part detailed and respectful; that the hero is named after a defunct American video game company is less palatable. Trickier still are the creative decisions related to language.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 16 February 2018
1 Comment
The closest Confucius came to this romantic view of work was a line expressed from the view of the bosses, saying, 'When he chooses the labours which are proper, and makes them labour on them, who will repine?' The answer as to who will repine, rather obviously, is the labourers.
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RELIGION
- Andrew Hamilton
- 23 October 2017
13 Comments
I am struck by the difference between these two kinds of reflection on life and death. It seems to lie in the articulacy of the appeal to be able to die under favourable conditions and the inarticulacy of those celebrated at Ozanam House. They had died as modestly and wordlessly as they had lived.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- N. N. Trakakis
- 18 September 2017
1 Comment
We do not know what we want. And we do not want what we know. Like shadows hanging in the air, their threads of reality unravelling, absenting themselves from the world. She said time erases life. He said let's be timeless. She said it would be dark. He said he hated daylight. She said it would be lonely. He said he prostituted his mind talking to people. She said he is mad. He said may God preserve him from sanity. She said: God will. And God did.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Megan Graham
- 26 July 2017
9 Comments
I came to the Planet of the Apes films a little late, thinking it was just a bit too far on the silly side for my tastes. But with time to kill on a holiday in 2014, I watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and found myself surprisingly invested in the emotions of the characters. Released in Australia today is the latest episode: War for the Planet of the Apes.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Megan Graham
- 05 July 2017
Malcolm X famously delineated two types of slave: the 'house Negro' and the 'field Negro'. Although a 'house slave' is closer to their oppressor and receives special privileges, they are still a slave. Chocolat in his role as the clown Auguste seems to be just another kind of house slave. Despite his success he is still maligned and at the mercy of masters. While rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, he is routinely denigrated. Attention, he learns, is not the same as respect.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Matthews
- 13 June 2017
2 Comments
One of the 30 comedians, satirists, cartoonists and writers they interviewed was John Clarke. 'I first met John Clarke five years ago,' Murray recalls in his 1992 introduction to the interview, 'even though we grew up in the same town in New Zealand and for a while went to the same school. My claim to fame is that I nearly knew John Clarke. Recently when we looked though his school photos we realised that we knew every kid in Palmerston North in 1960 except each other.'
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 30 May 2017
14 Comments
Brian's work was notable for its firm yet subtle control, the great tumbling yet disciplined lists of adjectives, the elevation of the quotidian, the appreciation of the natural world and its creatures, the sheer love of life. Re-reading one recent piece I find the references to the 'lovely bride' and 'the house wolf' almost unbearably touching. One reader wrote he was not initiated into Brian's 'grand mysteries', but that the joy and awe conveyed rang out with love and goodwill. How very true.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
We talk about how there are all sorts of illuminated beings in every sort of context, and how some beings serve their fellows by being great listeners, and others have healing hands, and others are good at getting everyone to come to a disgruntled agreement, and how some are lucky to discover that their skill, their gift, the thing they love to do and do really well, is to pay fierce attention to the holy of everything, to notice the flourish and song of holy and the awful of bruised and broken holy, and report on this to their brothers and sisters, which is, of course, everyone.
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