Some sample anecdotes:
• Many people read and enjoy J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and the good guys' fight against the evil of Mordor. Some of those who read it in college are activists. One campus cut down a pleasant grove of trees to make room for an ugly "Cultural Center" made of concrete blocks. Students detested the cutting down of trees, and on the ugly building someone wrote, "Another bit of Mordor."
• After humorist Art Buchwald's kidneys failed, he decided to enter Hospice and to decline dialysis. He also, however, decided to write a book about dying titled Too Soon to Say Goodbye and was able to continue joking while dying. When his lawyer, Bob Barnett, visited him, Mr. Buchwald told him, "If you can get me seven million dollars for my book like you got for Hillary Clinton, I'll start dialysis."
• A game that Alistair Cooke and his friends played was trying to tell a person's occupation by looking at their photograph. One friend would cut photographs of people who were not famous from newspapers and magazines. Each photograph was pasted on a piece of paper, and the game players were also given a sheet of paper that listed the occupations of the people in the photographs. As it happened, no one was very good at matching face and occupation - high scores were 20 or 25 percent accuracy. Most of the players felt certain that a person in one photograph was a murderer - he turned out to be a judge.
• When writer Dick DeBartolo began writing for MAD magazine, he quickly discovered that the employees engaged in a lot of good-natured ribbing. For example, he once brought a comic article to his boss, Nick Meglin, who laughed and laughed while reading the article. However, when Mr. DeBartolo asked which jokes he had laughed at most, Mr. Meglin replied, "None of the jokes. I was laughing at the typos. God, are you an awful speller!" (Don't feel bad for Mr. DeBartolo - for a span of several years, every issue of MAD included at least one article by him.)
