Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WESTWARD TO LAUGHTER by Colin MacInnes. 237 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...level, Maclnnes is still knowledgeably documenting his casebook on people-exploiting-people. For beneath the mock-replica Tom Jones style, Westward to Laughter is a kind of quick history of the slave trade-a flashback, so to speak, from Maclnnes' novel of black London, City of Spades. Shooting his imitation-lace cuffs and pointing angrily from today's ghetto back to the West Indies of the 1750s, Maclnnes says, in effect: here's where it all started...
HENRY: Not a point of it. PETER: I haven't seen Boston Strangler. HENRY: Neither did I. [Laughter.] I want to see it because Jane wrote me one of the nicest fan letters I ever got when she saw it in Paris. I don't like to see myself on the screen. I don't like the sound of my voice...
...club for the self-satisfied rich. An estimated 26 million Americans own stock directly, and 75 million more have an indirect stake through mutual funds and profit-sharing and pension plans. In the Cabinet Committee on Economics, the stock market is occasionally a topic for jokes-and some nervous laughter. To one out of two Americans, the subject right now is not very funny...
...phrase for the essential dualism of life. Civilization, said Bergson, unfolds so rapidly that its creator, man, is hard put to keep up. As a result, both culture and language are full of outdated forms. When man is abruptly made aware of them, he responds with chastened or chastening laughter. Why do yesterday's fashions invariably strike us as comic? Because, Bergson thought, they expose the ludicrousness of all fashion-an effort by a creature, born naked, to wear and animate his wardrobe as a kind of second skin...