Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...President put aside the cares of office to play host to 31 friends and schoolmates of Diana Hopkins on her tenth birthday, and, while the adventures of Dumbo unreeled on the White House screen, over & above the piping of school girls' squeaks, the President's hearty laughter boomed...
...indicative that the Club has lowered its standards of play selection, and the third production, William Gillette's "Too Much Johnson," can be defended on the grounds that it is an amusing period piece belonging to the Mauve Decade, a play that ran for years to the laughter of our fathers and grandfathers. In fact, if the writer of "Smoked Ham" will look back over the plays preformed by the Club during the past five years, I warrant that he will note nothing trashy about ninety per cent of them. They were plays that could not have been seen...
...rotund (180 lb.), 48, he grew up in New York City and went to Columbia, where he wrote a Ph.D. thesis on what was then (1916) the revolutionary theory of an annual wage for seasonal industries. Intending to teach, he was so irritated by the blank laughter his views aroused among businessmen that he went into business himself. His first venture was an unlikely scheme to sell U.S. oil products in bulk to Palestine. The first shipment netted him $20,000, and in three years he had 40% of the market...
Sometimes British listeners could hear laughter from the heckler's studio audience. Once he tipped his location by suddenly speaking, as if to a nearby radio technician, in Italian...
This combination of good acting and good writing is a rare thing on the modern stage. Almost every play has its dull spots and inessential characters, but "Blithe Spirit" has neither. Every moment of the two and a half hours is superb, and the audience is helpless with laughter from the opening curtain to the end. "Blithe Spirit" may well be the most hilarious farce ever written; certainly it is the funniest our generation has ever seen...