Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hello Again often succeeds at being funny, but maybe too deliberately so. The relentless barrage of one-liners tends to inspire nervous laughter. The "death" jokes, for example, prove to be of the worst taste: "I wouldn't have been caught dead in that dress," "I thought I'd never live to see the day," "Conquering death, that was a killer...
...motivation spills over, so does laughter. "She's a lot of fun to have around too. It helps when a captain has a sense of humor like hers. It makes life a lot easier for everyone on the team, including me," Wheaton says...
...Frescoes from the Past," in Life on the Mississippi," Mark Twain. For a reason nobody knows, Twain decided not to include this as a chapter in Huckleberry Finn. The tale is perhaps too completely black; it evokes throughout a strange mixture of gut-laughter and gut-fear. One thing for sure: having read it, you won't think the same of Huckleberry Finn, or its avuncular author, again. Not for abjurers of dead baby jokes...
Nearby, other fire fighters with faces like chimney sweeps exchange tales of close calls and prior battles. Their constant coughing sounds like a tuberculosis ward. As they talk, each fire takes on its own mischievous personality, some quick and cagey, others plodding and stubborn. Despite the laughter, some fire fighters appear homesick. The constant, tortuous line at the only two available pay phones is full of long faces. After waiting for 2 1/2 hrs. to call his wife, one man is greeted by an answering machine, and his howls echo through the smoke as he storms back to his tent...
...three hours, Burn This is too long and digressive, but as staged by Marshall W. Mason and a splendid young cast, it wins laughter in even its unnerving moments. If the narrative is indebted to the mainstream past, the tone has a more avant-garde echo of Sam Shepard -- a border skirmish between knockabout farce and knockdown violence. Yet Playwright Lanford Wilson manages to integrate well-crafted gags, mostly for the surviving gay roommate (Lou Liberatore). He describes his friend's gaudy casket as looking "like a giant Spode soup tureen." He says to the choreographer (Joan Allen) about...