Word: humorless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...humorless man deflated me. I thought about how mysterious and unaccountable laughter is, and how strange that an incapacity to laugh amounts to a disability. You almost avert your gaze...
...wondered if that onset of divinity might have some relationship to the physiology of tickling. I'm serious - if that is the word. The (humorless) physiologist describes laughter as spasmodic, rhythmic, vocalized, expiratory and, when due to tickling, involuntary: Those studying the neural pathways of what is called "the tickle-laughter reflex arc" postulate that tickling results from the simultaneous sensation of both touch and pain - a kind of benign assault, wherein Normality of touch (N) and a prospective Violence of pain (V) suddenly occupy the same space. N + V = H (hilarity...
Buechner did not venture an answer to my question about the meaning of "great laughter." Difficult enough to talk about grace; impossible to explain laughter. We passed on to a discussion of secrets. I thought again of the humorless man I had met, and it struck me his affliction amounted to a form of stupidity. Stupidity, too, is one of the mysteries...
...only song to make it into the soundtrack amongst the musical references in Bale's memorable monologues in the film about major '80s stars, such as Phil Collins and Whitney Houston, and unfortunately it's been deleted from the newer versions of the soundtrack. What is left is a humorless shell, a mish-mash of remixes that after the first cacophonous and starkly violent playing, leave the listener no reason to come back. C -Jimmy...
...favorite is the autobiography of Lana Turner, published some years ago. It is a strangely affecting work--eerily earnest, humorless and literal-minded--in which a certain Southern California, film-noir, '40s bleakness persuades the reader, after a hundred pages, that in a former life Lana Turner and Richard Nixon may have been the same person. It is a very spooky experience...