Word: laughing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...most tragic episodes . . . occurred when a ghost writer who was employed to write a farewell address for Hon. John White, Speaker of the House of Representatives in the 27th Congress . . . copied copiously from the farewell address delivered by Vice President Aaron Burr. . . . Mr. White, being unable to laugh at the comic position into which the ghost writer had placed him, was on the contrary so overcome with mortification and disgust that he committed suicide...
Princetonians know Jack Crocker, now 39, as a big, dark-haired, broad-browed man who looks like Napoleon in his youth, likes his exercise (squash and tennis), loves to argue, has a laugh like a small thunderclap, six children and a comely wife (née Mary Hallowell, sister of two famed Harvard athletes) who sometimes needs to remind him where he parked his car. An earnest student, a disciple of Humanist Paul Elmer More, Crocker is a practitioner of "muscular Christianity." In this he resembles old Dr. Peabody, who used to play games with his students...
...graduation is not a time to reflect on one's relation to Harvard with the warm feeling pecular to romanticists ; it is an instant of gaiety at a crossroads of life, a careless laugh at the occasion, and a happy oversight of its significance. Graduation, like tragedy, has its comic element, and its participants accept it undramatically in the way that people experience all great events. Graduation is as simple as the black of the seniors' gowns and the white which their families and friends wear in celebration...
...Hollywood Mike is a magnificent stooge in a place which can afford magnificent stooges. They laugh at his good-natured Oxonian pomposity, chuckle over his full assumed title, Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff, never use his real name, Harry Gerguson...
...tale of Hollywood's lunatic fringe, The Day of the Locust regards its characters as the human equivalent of Hollywood's architecture: "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous...