Word: laughter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...humor shows in her antic put-ons and putdowns, mostly of herself. It shows in her laughter, a corroboree of chuckles, whinnies and convulsions. And it shows in her writing. Simple in style, mundane in subject matter, her thrice-weekly column for 200 newspapers (including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Boston Globe) has a title that precisely conveys her puckish point of view. She calls it "At Wit's End." What most tickles Erma, a former women's news reporter for the Dayton Journal Herald, is her unfashionable fascination with being a housewife. Her beat, she once...
...English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paintpot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man's fate and man's follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth. Rarely has a people paid the lavish compliment and taken the subtle revenge of turning its oppressor's speech into sorcery...
...viewer this year, the ceremony was something like a banquet in a Howard Johnson's. The decor was pleasant, the food we were served, rather tasteless. Bob Hope, "America's Ambassador of Laughter," was there, with his own bland brand of social satire. "It's such a novelty seeing actors and actresses with their clothes on" and "Up until a few months ago, I thought that The Sterile Cuckoo was the story of Tiny Tim" were two of his more biting lines...
...Laughter, simmered in self-mockery, was the first black soul food. It fed the slave during his fierce day's travail in the shimmering Georgia cotton fields. It simultaneously comforted the second-class citizen and nurtured his sense of subservience during the agonizing disappointment of Reconstruction and through the long dark age of de jure segregation. Flight from reality, as illustrated in the nonsense lyric of Dan Tucker, formed the bedrock of the earliest Negro humor. Later, vaudeville, radio and the movies perpetuated the blackface minstrel stereotype of the happy-go-lucky devourer of watermelons...
This sort of low caricature could hardly persist after the battle for civil rights was truly joined. In those tense days of the '50s and early '60s, laughter came to serve dual functions. By mocking the black's own intolerable position, it bolstered his emerging self-awareness as he marched on Selma and Washington. At the same time, it pricked the white's guilt feelings by chastening him for years of brutal apathy, then soothed his conscience with the balm of newfound empathy. Says Black Comic Stu Gilliam: "Until we marched in the streets...