Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...joking and laughter were gone. In Bacon County you did not curse "the sun or the rain or the land or God. They were all the same thing." To have lived there and known that was something Crews had forgotten--something the pop sociologists, fresh from one tour down Interstate 20, never understood--but he knew it again and would always know it. We are fortunate he has taken the time to explain...
When it came to annihilating bromides, Plomer was a vigilante. He continually hunted worn phrases, particularly the ones found in obituaries: "infectious laughter," "selfless devotion," "indomitable courage." As to the deceased who possessed "an immense affection for all animals," a question nagged: "Did he cherish warthogs and dote on hyenas, did he take the skunk to his bosom?" Plomer's acerbic critiques did not stop at the mirror. For his own epitaph he furnished a shrewd, unblinking self-estimate...
Onstage, Gogol's characters look naturalistic enough, even transparently accessible, but it is the unseen company they keep-God, the devil and Russia-that lends them the strange dimensions of figures in fables. At one point in Marriage, a key character breaks into a paroxysm of laughter about the absurdity of just about everything. Then his face takes on an ashen look of desolation, and he says, "God have mercy on our sinning souls." Gogol uses such juxtapositions to go beyond tragedy or comedy into a realm that might be called cosmic farce...
...First, let me assure you that I am not a contestant." There is strained laughter. Brooke, a man famous for his sexual magnetism among other things, looks old--the last few months, the day-to-day campaign trail routine, haven't helped his appearance. The makeup he wears when campaigning smears the knot of his paisley tie and the collar of his striped shirt...
...Erma Bombeck's regular weekday stint on ABC's Good Morning America. From her humble beginnings as a syndicated newspaper humor columnist, Bombeck has evolved into a TV personality of the most plastic sort. She delivers her one-liners in a strident vibrato; she luxuriates in canned laughter as though it were the praise of a Nobel Prize jury. Bombeck used to satirize the vulgarity of American suburbia; now she epitomizes...