Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bathos, clear expositions of readily identifiable social or personal problems. "The fire," he said, "burns in me slowly and evenly." He does not work from idea to speech and gesture. He cannot be dismissed as indifferent, pessimistic, morbid, or hopeful. So we recoil with impatience from these exhibitions of laughter and despair, muttering vaguely about melancholy, ineffectual people, and a possibly hopeful future...
...candor of detached analysis is only more sophisticated romantic illusion. Self-revelation is a mist of uncynical dream and deception. And this leads to the main reason why the audience feels depressed rather than exhilarated by a Chekhov comedy. The audience can rarely indulge in detached laughter at the characters' expense, because there is no comic spectacle of abstracted human follies on stage, only a concentration of suggestions and perceptions of errors which the audience understand no more clearly than the characters themselves. Or Chekhov...
...abide even minute inattention as to voice and motion. After the disintegration of The Three Sisters and The Tempest, it is moving to find a director who nobly produces this incomparable symphony of a dramatic poem with such integrity. The honor, love, death, the sorrow, rancor, and joy of laughter and release are all present and unencumbered. This is a gentle and monumental play of soldiers, and lovers, and gods, of grief and crowns and consolation, of metaphor and music which even Shakespeare never surpassed. And this is one of the most welcome, the most sane, and the most honorable...
Many Republicans, too, were dismayed at the choice Nixon had given them. One who pressed most actively for confirmation began to explain how rough his task had been. "When you try to defend a mediocre racist," he said ?and then he broke into laughter at how ridiculous that sounded. Maryland's Mathias thought at first that Carswell might "be getting a bum rap" from the kind of legal scholars who look down on lawyers who have not "been to Harvard," but decided to vote no after examining Carswell's record. Minority Leader Scott, influential with liberal Republicans, left most...
...Expo '70 (see MODERN LIVING), only ten miles from the blast, the Japan Gas Association Pavilion was closed for 24 hours. The Pavilion's chief attraction is an exhibit entitled "World of Laughter...