Word: humorous
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Road Premier Edouard Daladier might be slipping and perhaps the secret session would be full of banana peels. It lasted 31 hours, with only three recesses. Then journalists and an eager Paris crowd were permitted to swarm into the galleries. They looked down on a Chamber filled with good humor. Some Deputies greeted the crowd with handclaps, others waved to the galleries. Abrupt silence fell as the urns were produced. The Chamber was about to vote on the supreme issue of confidence-or lack of confidence-in the general conduct of the war by Edouard Daladier...
...almanacs, Richard M. Dorson '37 has selected and edited in an extremely readable way the best of the Davy Crockett stories. That fantastic legendary figure, a combination of an epic hero and a coarse, earthy frontier representation of Baron Munchausen, is more than just an early example of American humor at its broadest and most extravagant. The Crockett Almanacs, with their crazy exaggerations and crudities and all their local color, have real literary value and show the frontier spirit at its best and worst...
Without any question, all matters of culture and mythology aside, these ancedotes make wonderful reading. The stories are bulging with humor, the dialect is fast moving and expressive, and the tall tales are fantastic and original. It has been held by some reviewers that the Almanacs, with all their humor, have not the literary quality ascribed to them by Howard M. Jones in his foreword to the book. Although the "lyric exuberance" of these stories might be doubted, what does seem undeniably present in these anecdotes is an outstanding amount of imagination and originality in the language and the situations...
...illuminating introduction, Mr. Dorson makes a general discussion of "Frontier Humor and Legend." He treats with the exaggeration, verbal imagery, and other conventions of this frontier humor. Most significantly of all, he mentions the "unmistakable sameness to the varied versions of the American tall tale--It is the frontiersman's fun, his escape, his opportunity to create." The Crockett Almanacs are the true expression of the frontier; as such Mr. Dorson has done a valuable service in making this material accessible...
...Child Is Born (Warner Bros.) records with varying degrees of self-conscious pathos and humor the birth of seven infants. In this somewhat redundant remake of the tear-jerking stage play, Life Begins, first screened in 1932, grave, talented, strikingly lovely Geraldine Fitzgerald plays the mother who dies (from a Caesarean operation) that her baby may live. Other maternity-ward performers: Spring Byington, Gloria Holden, Gladys George, and 20 babies (average age 14 days), who, by working a total of 73 seconds, earning $75, became Hollywood's highest-paid actors. From their pay checks the far-sighted...