Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cannot have pre-Christian Rome, contemporary London will do. Sunning himself in a graveyard one afternoon, Sloane is taken in-in every sense-by Kath (Beryl Reid). She is a bloated harpy who will never need silicone or estrogen. Enter two gentlemen who provide complications and multiply laughter. Kath's father Dadda (Alan Webb) is a senescent buzzard; her brother Ed (Harry Andrews) is a lantern-jawed caricature of muscle-bound Christianity...
...Laughter is Lisagor's calling card. He has stepped on Khrushchev's foot, fallen asleep in the Taj Mahal and walked head-on into a lamp post (with bloody consequences) while recording the words of Lyndon Johnson...
They made their own sound-laughter, interminable rapping, impromptu guitar-plucking, the blare of transistor radios, and finally a makeshift concert by nondescript local bands, with amplifiers powered by two ice-cream trucks. The most distinctive note was the brash hawking of drugs. "Good black hashish for $3.50!" shouted one youth. Countered a bearded pusher: "Buy one tab of acid and get a free tab of smack!" Kids on bad trips were treated by volunteer physicians, and were urged over a makeshift public-address system to "bring a few joints for the doctors." As the week progressed, drug abuse became...
...another commercial, a woman at a crowded cocktail party asks her husband to say something funny. "General Telephone," he replies, and everyone falls into paroxysms of laughter. The punch line: "We know some people think our service is laughable, but we're spending $200 million in California this year to improve it. What's so funny about that...
Cataplexy-a sadistic punishment that might have been designed for the ninth circle of Dante's hell-threatens to become a metaphor for the condition of humor in the 1970s. At the moment, the silent absence of laughter is deafening, though the will to laugh is agonizingly there. Where are the wits of yesterday? The game is a humiliation to play...