Word: laughingly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography about how much he loved what were called "nigger shows" in his youth--these were minstrel shows, mostly with white men performing in blackface--and his delight in getting his prim mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent assaults on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not. The shows were simply a form of entertainment popular all over the country in the 19th century, a part...
...modest and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted.") It appeared in newspapers all across the country, was received as a whole new kind of hilariousness and made him famous. "At the close of the Civil War, Americans were ready for a good cleansing laugh, untethered to bitter political argument," writes Twain's recent, so far definitive biographer, Ron Powers. And at least in this first moment of his fame, that's what Twain gave them...
...enough to hold a large lecture-hall audience rapt. He spoke in a slow backwoods drawl, with many strategic pauses. In 1891 he experimented with an Edison dictating machine but concluded that "you can't write literature with it." (He liked to have a human secretary taking notes and laughing in the right places.) But he wasn't the sort of funny man who laughs at his own jokes. In performance and in life, Twain's facial expression--except, presumably, when he was furious, which was often--was deadpan. After Twain's death, the editor of the North American Review...
...gave me a graduate education in all things New York. Tim's favorite Moynihan story was about the time he had to pick up Pat at the Pierre Hotel in New York City to take him to a dinner. Tim arrived at the hotel and heard the distinctive laugh, "Ah-ah-ah-ah-AH!" from inside the room. "Ah-ah-ah-ah-AH!" Just peals of laughter. Tim paused a minute, uncertain about bothering the boss. "Ah-ah-ah-Ah-AHH!" Finally, he knocked. "Moyns came to the door in his underwear," Tim recalled. "He'd been watching The Honeymooners...
...nearly one of them, but he survived - minus a leg that was amputated below his knee. Barely conscious, he cracked a joke with his comrades from the Salaheddin Brigades jostling around his bed. "It looks like my leg has reached paradise before I did," Yusef said with a weak laugh...