Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...diagnosis: "On opening night, the wise-guy audience laughed fit to bust, either because it was hep to Hart's lilliputian libels, or because it wanted the fellow in the next seat to think it was. But the average gent and his missus are evidently more interested in laughter . . . Light Up the Sky comes through as a private show-business joke...
Thus far, audiences have shown one remarkable reaction. Many have tittered at times, or laughed out loud at the grotesquely pathetic antics of the mad. This laughter is probably no more than a release from nervous strain. In a sense, occasional nervous laughter at The Snake Pit is a measure of its excellence: U.S. moviegoers are not usually troubled by overdoses of reality. The Snake Pit suggests that Hollywood itself might even be cured some day of its own mild schizophrenia, which has made it live for so long in a world of fancy. It also suggests-at a time...
Miss Cam laughs a lot when she talks and soon she had me laughing with her. But this easy laughter didn't indicate a vacilating or pliant personality; it was not an invitation to conversation. It was, however, an indication of a very sunny disposition. She can read a lengthy stretch of medieval constitutional law (lapsing occasionally into Latin and Anglo-Saxon) with all the gusto and delight of Mary Margaret McBridge revealing a new recipe for banana cream...
There were fewer interruptions for laughter now, and a telephone ring at that moment suggested my time was up. But I held firm. When Miss Cam returned from the call, I hurriedly mentioned her copies of Henry Adams, one of her predecessors in medieval history. What did she think of his pot shots at Harvard? "Oh, I've really not been here long enough to say. He was an extraordinarily clever man, though." Well--what about hobbies? The Last Resort. "I like walking and cycling; I do wish I had brought over my bicycle. And I also do some water...
...some areas of the world, laughter is dangerous. Several Germans were recently arrested in the Soviet zone of Germany after movie theater audiences had guffawed at (1) a film purporting to show Soviet ships unloading food for Germany; (2) newsreel pictures of barrel-bellied Wilhelm Pieck, German Communist boss, who reminds many of his compatriots of the late Hermann Goring. But whether laughter was the privilege of the free or the furtive solace of the oppressed, it continued as always to lighten man's burden...