Word: laughter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is history to make the gods weep, perhaps with laughter. Three incompatible cultures met late in the 18th century, when English explorers began to poke into the great fever swamp of western Africa that is now Nigeria. Arab traders had arrived 300 years earlier, recommending their religion and bringing news that a minor local industry, slave raiding, could be the basis of a thriving export trade. The Britons advocated their own faith. They also urged the unwelcome view that slavery was immoral. It interfered with the manpower needed for the palm-oil trade...
...head and "O.K." signs. Through the narrow doorway, only the orchestra was visible and the brightly-lit scrim which changed color from scene to scene: red, green, blue. Stage lights turned the air to a tinged blue haze which echoed with the disembodied voices of actors and laughter and applause. Every so often an actor dashed through the greenroom, grabbing a throat lozenge or gulp of water along the way. "We have a pretty good audience" Douglas Hughes breathed in mid-dash. Upstairs, Dorothy Weaver, the producer, watched from the top row of the balcony. She anticipated every light...
...traditions, the annual Hasty Pudding Theatrical. The Crimson, typifying the worst kind of elitism, inverse snobbery, dealt an unfair blow to what it felt was the "establishment" at Harvard. In so doing, your "reviewers" lost complete sight of the ideals of the Pudding show, especially since its good-hearted laughter is set in so improbable a time and place as to make its "sexism" and "elitism" totally innocuous...
...Unexpurgated Code carries this spoofing to near-fetish heights--for 289 pages, you're on the verge of uncontrollable laughter. Divided into six parts, this manual provides for all possible situations and exigencies of the social rat race: "Social Climbing," "Extinctions and Mortalities," "Vilenesses Various," "In Pursuit of Comfortable Habits," "Perils and Precautions," "Mischief and Memorabilia." The atmosphere is English manor house, gently decadent. Catalogued are innumerable pointers, all that the debonaire and naughty aristocrat must do to succeed is meticulously explained. There are rules and tips concerning accent improvement, farting in public, horsemanship, ass-kissing, being a big shot...
...presence of a Brando, a Newman, or even a DeNiro. He does not have that brooding presence that would be more suitable for the part, but his performance as The Boy Wonder is one of his best. Generally, he manages to avoid the idiosyncratic gestures--the nervous cackling laughter and the sardonic grin--that even at twenty-eight have already become identifiably Dreyfuss. He is able to convey the suffering of a mind slowly suffocating, and while he may not be captivating, he is compelling...