Word: laughter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...comfortably to Parliament and stand for Reform. Instead, Percy took direct action against what he conceived as oppression, social and personal, by marrying a pretty schoolgirl who didn't want to go back to school. Blunden supplies attractive pictures of this adventure-of Harriet "ready to die of laughter" as the 20-year-old Percy, slim and shrill-voiced, stood on a Dublin balcony hurling moral tracts at selected passersby. A combatant for liberty, Shelley poetized in Queen Mob against kings, priests, commerce, wealth and war; he sought out the reformer, William Godwin, and in due course fell...
Exit Laughing. In Chile Island, Chile, Narcisco Quezada and Friend Violeta Munoz confessed that they had tied Violeta's husband to a table, tickled his feet until he choked to death with laughter...
...Present Laughter (by Noel Coward; produced by John C. Wilson) was in no great hurry to cross the Atlantic after its London production (TIME, May 10, 1943). Now it is here, only Noel Coward addicts need be in a hurry to see it. Barring a few funny lines, it is pretty barren folderol about the life, loves and self-appreciation of a British matinee idol...
Spoofing matinee idols is not the newest of sports, and Present Laughter needs much fresher turns & twists than it ever gets. The best scenes are too much alike, the others never get going. Almost everyone is ostentatiously rude, but almost no one is witty. It's partly, perhaps, because Coward is such an old hand at this kind of thing that he makes it seem...
...change of prima donnas changed the Met's backstage atmosphere. When she wasn't on stage, Flagstad had knitted quietly in the wings, avoided visitors. Traubel opened the door of her dingy little dressing room to anyone who could crowd inside. Her laughter boomed so lustily that stage managers feared it could be heard in the auditorium. In the old horse-&-buggy era, Wagnerian divas like Johanna Gadski and Lillian Nordica had expected even the stagehands to wait on them. Traubel insists on putting on her own makeup, wig and costumes, because "being dependent is a luxury...