Word: ha
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...most frequent guests, Don Rickles, said the other night, "I thought he was a football player and the pads were too high"); and the sharp, brittle laugh, which was less an expression of mirth than a cue to the audience that his current guest had passed the test. This ha-ha bark was humanized by proximity to the warmer, manly, practiced guffaw of his announcer, Ed McMahon. But that was Ed's job: the designated laugher, his boss' exemplary yes man. (Literally, since he would add a Yes! to the laugh...
...wound has all but deprived him of the power of speech. Anytime he tries to talk, the best he can do is bark out one or two syllables. "I gave up explaining years ago," he says, in the gently lyrical interior monologue that makes up Dave King's The Ha-Ha (Little, Brown; 340 pages). By the time we come upon him in thickening middle age, Howie has pretty much given up venturing beyond the placid, meaty enclosure of himself. "Not," he tells us, "is the one word I can dependably force...
...Ha-Ha is a very skilled first novel, a book full of deep feeling rendered with light, sure strokes. It's also one more variation, but a lovely one, on a very old story form, the sensitive heart trapped in a monster's body. Think of Beauty and the Beast or Boo Radley, the well-meaning neighborhood oddity in To Kill a Mockingbird...
...ha-ha? As students of English gardening will know, that's a man-made landscape feature, a trench dug to conceal a fence in order to preserve the view. The nuns have one on the grounds of their convent, which Howie loves to approach at perilous speeds on his tractor mower. We go right to the edge with him, and even if we're not always laughing, we're glad to be along for the ride...
...snowy Chicago parking lot for Kmart, I have an epiphany: hobby shops. My confidence renewed, I make my way to two odd stores that smell like diesel and boys. Same story at both: no Polar Express trains until February. "Ha! Good luck," says the owner of Grayland Station. He slips me the card of a friend's shop that had one set as of last night. From my car, I dial my cell phone with frozen fingers. The woman who answers tells me I am lucky: I'll be No. 58 on her waiting list. The Toy Station...