Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Herbert is an extremely serious man who is always making jokes, and his biggest jokes are the most serious. But to take him seriously is to make him laff. To laff, as they tell you in Dublin, is not the same thing as to laugh; Laughter is a nervous reaction. Laffing is an expression of selfcriticism, of anguish...
...sensation as Uncle Tom's Cabin, quickly became the bible of temperance lecturers, was made into a play, set a whole nation singing "Father, dear father, come home with me now!" The lurid lessons of Simon Slade's saloon, the Sickle & Sheaf, eventually produced more laughter than fears, more vaudeville jokes than pious homilies. But their spirit lived on, to bring national prohibition...
...McThing has the great fault of bohemia-the mussed look, the makeshift furnishings, the "interesting" but rather amateurish dinner that arrives several hours late. For, barring some salted nuts, it is not till Mrs. McThing is more than half over that any food for laughter begins to appear...
...very funny, but nobody laughed. Then Director Ford, still sitting down, gave the cue: he threw back his head and rocked with laughter. From that moment, Duke began to revere John Ford. Not to be outdone, Ford gave the youngster his fatherly affection. "I could see," Ford says now, "that here was a boy who was working for something-not like most of the other guys, just hanging around to pick up a few fast bucks. Duke was really ambitious and willing to work. Inside of a month or six weeks we were fast friends, and I used to advise...
...Lowell's amiable quips to our freshman class in 1911 somehow got deformed on its way to your editorial on the School of Design (yesterday) morning. The old man said that a given educational problem was likely to strike Harvard about ten years before it struck Yale. After the laughter subsided, he went on to say that in consequence we at Harvard had to work out the first solutions, which was not always an easy thing...