[See part two below!] 

HELO

www.Helo-Magazine.com

www.Twitter.com/HELO_Magazine 

Thanks, Manu! 

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The U.N. Addresses a Critical Issue

     Part 2 "Return of the Task Force"

Comic Wit by Manu, Dec-Feb 2010

www.Helo-Magazine.com 

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Wit and Wisdom from the Sages of Tragic Comedy

Featuring quotes from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Woody Allen, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jimi Hendrix, Aug-Sep 2009 

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 [The Editors are searching for wit and wisdom from all over the world. While this collection highlights American dark humor, we would love to see something fresh from anywhere, from a Tuareg Malian stand-up comic to a wild story from Assam. If you have interesting quotes, pics, links to video, or other unveiling humor related to coping with great adversity, please submit them to the editors via Joe Tsali, joseph.tsali@gmail.com .]

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Known for his exploration of the tragedies he survived in Germany during the Second World War in his humorous fictitious novels, Mother Night and Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut also visited Nigeria to cover the Biafra War in the late 1960’s.

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“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” ~ KV 

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“Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.” ~ KV

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“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.” ~ KV

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“We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.” ~ KV 

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“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” ~ KV

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“Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.” ~ KV

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“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.” ~ KV 

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“Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.” ~ KV

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“People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.” ~ KV

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“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” ~ KV

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“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?” ~ KV

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Woody Allen

In the midst of a silly feature film comedy, Allen’s film Love and Death asked the question whether assassination could be morally justified if it saved lives during the Franco-Russian War. Bananas poked fun while considering the Cuban Revolution and how the media covered such events. And Sleeper made fun of, while letting viewers experience a bit of the absurdities of life in a dictatorship.

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"I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown." ~WA

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“It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.” ~ WA

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“I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.” ~ WA

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“When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.” ~ WA

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“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.” ~ WA

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“I'm very proud of my gold pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.” ~ WA

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“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.” ~ WA

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“The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don't have.” ~ WA

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Hunter S. Thompson

Early in his career, Thompson left the US Air Force and traveled to South America where he covered political turmoil in Peru, among other places, before writing about drug culture in Mexico. Ultimately, he may have been best known not only for writing about what it was like to walk into a cop convention stoned, but also for providing one of the most flavorful and vicarious – if exaggerated – chronicles of American politics in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.

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“If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.” ~ HST

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“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.” ~ HST

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“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.” ~ HST

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“If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.” ~ HST

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“The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.” ~ HST

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“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” ~ HST

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“The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” ~ HST

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Jimi Hendrix

After going airborne in the US Army in the early sixties, rock guitarist Hendrix set off for England then wrote songs like “Machine Gun” as audio explorations of the pain of the Vietnam War.

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“In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.” ~ JH

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“I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.” ~ JH

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“I have this one little saying, when things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.” ~ JH

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Find more quotes like these at: www.Brainyquote.com.