Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Nerves. Amid the laughter and the happy clink of coin, revolutionary Cuba was as left out as a snowbound Kansas farm. Even after the casinos reopened (see below), war-scared tourists were so scarce that each big Havana hotel offered 40 to 50 free rooms to Miami travel agents as a come-on. Most of the $60 million annual revenue from tourism will be lost. The peaceful islands do not hesitate to capitalize on the trouble. "While other countries in the Caribbean undergo riot and revolution," beamed the Jamaica Tourist Board last week, "Jamaica remains a haven of happiness...
Obviously this sort of script calls for desperate measures. John D. Hancock, who directed, has taken them, but they are the wrong ones. In his efforts to stir up laughter, he has employed books, scrolls, wineskins, spectacles, a rolling pin, a gavel, quill pens, a pitcher, drinking glasses, an earring, a pogo stick, and a live rabbit, among other things. If the rabbit could have been induced to misbehave on cue, I have no doubt but that this would also have been added to the pleasures of the occasion. The cast performs with commendable energy, which might better have been...
...laughter of his guests had suddenly died away, and Boris Pasternak sat disconsolately at his own 69th birthday party listening to the angry words of his wife. "How many times have I told you not to trust journalists?" she shrilled. "They are only exploiting you for personal gain. If this continues, I'll leave you." Sadly the old poet murmured, "I promise you, Zinochka"-but nothing could change the fact that just as the ugly furor over Doctor Zhivago and the Nobel Prize seemed to be fading away, something new had happened to stir things up again...
...sponsors. Patti Page and Buddy Bregman, with their variety shows, will be dropped in March; Man with a Camera, a freelance photographer's adventures, was a flop from the start, will also disappear next month. Behind Closed Doors, a cloak-and-daguerreotype, is almost sure to follow. Even laughter is losing out in a dreary season: by May, Uncle Miltie Berle and the Kraft Music Hall part company as planned. George Burns, George Gobel. Ed Wynn, Jackie Gleason will be gone...
Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech...