Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...bobby sox brigade. Johnson gets too cute at times, much to the brigade's delight, and the slapstick isn't always up to Shavian standards. But you don't have to be a bobby-soxer to enjoy Johnson's plight on his first duck-hunting trip, and constant adult laughter at the many good gags drowned out the most ambitious concerted squeals the soxers could muster last night...
...West End cinema rocked with uneasy laughter night before last when a bedraggled woman squatter babbled into a newsreel microphone that she and her old man had been living in one room in South Kensington, that another couple had just moved in with them, and that: "It was ever so public." Better-off Britons, who see such newsreels and read about squatters, have that uneasy feeling that they had when wartime evacuations suddenly washed to the surface thousands of children with lice in their hair...
...course we can't let him in." Mrs. Roosevelt: "Franklin, don't say 'we can't let him in.' . . . You know who they'll blame . . . me." Churchill, with a "guileless" grin: "A matter of matrimony, I believe." Loud laughter...
...Germans laughed when Charlie Chaplin, as the Jewish barber, shaved a customer in time with Brahms. They laughed when Chaplin, as Dictator Hynkel, danced around the balloon world until it finally exploded in his face. But slowly the laughter thinned, embarrassed, shocked silence hovered in the stifling little theater. No one laughed at the concentration-camp scenes nor at Charlie's girl friend who hit a Storm Trooper over the head with a frying pan. There was hardly a ripple when the Jews matched pennies to determine who would kill the Dictator...
When it was over, the audience chattered excitedly. This part of the show was prima; that part schlecht. The whole was like a nightmare to them. The tragedy of Naziism was still too close for laughter-and so was the time when Germans had cheered the Great Dictator. In a poll taken by the Army they voted against further showing of the film in Germany now. Wrote the Tagesspiegel next day: "It seems as if reality had only to be copied and satire was readymade...