Word: humorlessness
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...history takes stage center as Bitos actually becomes Robespierre. There are tableaux of the boy being caned by a Jesuit schoolmaster for his stiff-necked pride, of Robespierre as a humorless young parliamentary Stalin outraging the more moderate Mirabeau ("You've taught me a very sad thing, which is that the Revolution could be a bore"), of Robespierre dictating new decrees of death in a last mad spasm of guillotine-hungry power...
...Washington's most sedate, tasteful and elegant hotel: The May-flower. Along the gently curving balconies of the ballroom, party employees draped slender streamers of bunting dotted with tiny LBJ-HHH stickers. At each end of the room hung modestly sized portraits of the ticket mates, both pale and humorless...
...creation of a onetime farm boy named Harold Lincoln Gray, Annie ranks as one of the most durable, reactionary, humorless and lucrative little brats in the history of the funnies. In 40 years she has poured nearly $5,000,000 into Artist Gray's pocket-a figure that does not, to be sure, put him in Daddy Warbucks' class; Daddy is several times a billionaire. Even today, despite evidence of a waning national interest in the comics, Annie still reaches a paid readership of 30 million...
...Stone. Other leaders in history have felt that they were doing God's bidding, but none with the sublime certitude of Cromwell. To the brilliant, humorless Puritan who routed the Royalist armies in England's civil war and ruled the nation for a decade until his death in 1658, "providence and necessity" seemed synonymous. In this finely etched account of the winter of 1648-49, the height of Cromwell's career, British Historian C. V. Wedgewood shows how relentlessly he invoked both, to strip away the "divinity that doth hedge a king...
...McLuhan is not playing games. He is in humorless earnest. And if the book is taken seriously, it must be judged as fuzzy-minded, lacking in perspective, low in definition and data, redundant, and contemptuous of logical sequence-which is to say that McLuhan has perfectly illustrated the cool qualities he most values in communications. McLuhan's solemn pseudo science at work: "What do we know about the social or psychic energies that develop by electric fusion or implosion when literate individuals are suddenly gripped by an electromagnetic field, such as occurs in the new Common Market pressure...