Word: laughe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...only link to the world outside. Government agents took one look, decided that it was useless to try to recover the dead. Instead, they suggested that the Sondondinos leave their ancient home for a safer place. Scoffed one old survivor: "These men from the coast make me laugh. They talk as if this were our first ayapana. We have had them since God knows when...
Robert Cummings and Eagle-Lion Films have hammered together a ramshackle little comedy that is partly funny and mostly dismal. Almost everything in "Let's Live A Little" worthy of a laugh has been filched from another picture or another era. In a night-club scene, Cummings shamelessly repeats the Groucho Marx classic: "If we dance any closer, I'll be in back of you." He makes liberal use of several Buster Keaton slapstick techniques, such as the hurling of moist, gooey materials, and has exhumed the standard character of the jittery businessman...
...Another story, "Banker's Holiday," is a suspiciously whimsical piece for the Lampoon. I say 'suspiciously' because I was expecting some dirty little hoax at the conclusion, but the author maintains the fantasy through the ending, and, except for its length and occasional awkwardness of diction ("Tom began to laugh. 'Oh hell,' he choked.") it is a creditable bit of fantasy...
Looking back at past U.S. depressions, from Martin Van Buren to Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman got a good-natured laugh when he mentioned his own 1921 bankruptcy-"when the businessman got into politics," meaning himself. But he turned dead serious when he talked of the need for preventing any such panics in the future by "planned" (i.e., not controlled) economy. Said the President: "It is absolutely essential that the economic structure of the United States of America remain absolutely sound and prosperous, for the simple reason that ... we have become the symbol of what governments should stand for-the welfare...
Tickle, Tickle. Koestler wants to show what forces cause human beings to think, to create and to destroy. As a "back door" into this problem, he begins by examining the forces that make men laugh. He shows, with the help of a number of geometric diagrams and a lot of peeking into the plumbing of "the sympathico-adrenal system," that laughter is a form of self-assertion. This section of the book also notes some pedagogical experiments in what Koestler gravely calls "the functioning of the original squirm reflex"-a phenomenon further documented in his book by laboratory experiments...