Word: laughe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Some people don't like Benchley. But then some people don't like Coca-Cola, baseball games, or the Old Howard. Benchley's stock in trade is undiluted humor -- sometimes tempered with sophistication, cynicism, or satire, but invariably funny as hell. No one knows precisely what makes people laugh. Benchley's theory is that "all laughter is merely a compensatory reflex action to take the place of sneezing." If this is true, Benchley must be an awful pain in the neck for the manufacturers of Kleenex, a product which would have alarmingly small sales among the devotees...
...best laugh-provokers of the story was respectable Mr. Day's use of ungentlemanly language on occasion, but Dame Boston, of course, shuddered down to the soles of her high-button shoes and proceeded to make the show presentable enough for her charges. This literary vacuum cleaning nullities the famous closing line in which father informs the local policeman that, "I am going to be baptized,"--a rather flatly received statement without the ensuing "Damn...
...Syrup-slow dining-room service had queered routine entertaining. Bar prices ($2.45 for a Scotch) dried up most sociable drinking. Griped Ecuador's Foreign Minister José Trujillo, worried about his bills after a revolution at home: "It costs $64 a day to live; it costs extra to laugh." Some delegates had derived their chief pleasure from watching (no admission charge) a red-white-&-blue ping-pong ball dancing atop a single-jet fountain in the hotel's vast (500-ft.-long) main corridor...
...easiest way out of understanding "Nevsky" is to laugh at it and it is true that some very funny cracks go around the Old South when the crowd there is small. However, a somewhat new experience can be had by giving oneself up to the movie's naive strength. Nevsky is a superhuman hero, completely shove the bourgeois jealousies and physical frailties of mere man, and so is, and should be, repugnant to American audiences. Consequently, the picture cannot be taken seriously or realistically, but as a work of art it is simple, strong, and beautifully organized...
...takes on a wrestler, only to beat him, and then have to be carried away himself. Toughest problem of the picture: which is the more pathetic, Henry Tudor or Charles Laughton trying to be Henry Tudor? There are a couple of obstacles to be overcome. 1) Watching Laughton laugh, and 2) watching Laughton eat. However, some people may even enjoy the latter; at least some did when the picture first appeared in the Thirties. In the seenes that do not show 1) and 2), there's a fairly steady tailwind to keep you going