Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...main thing wrong with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Simon's affectionate memoir of those days, is that this manic style of writing, which he vividly recalls in conversation, is never really seen onstage. The play, which opened on Broadway last week, will delight Simon fans who yearn for the days when he wrote to be funny, without the poignant self-analysis that has enriched such late works as Broadway Bound and Jake's Women. For those who admire these later plays and think he found in them his great theme -- the making of a writer and the moral conundrums...
...conveys the writers' affection for their chief performer. But it leaves unexplored the vital conflict within each writer and between them all -- the egotism of being an artist vs. the collaborative necessities of cranking out scripts at such speed. Indeed, not much about these people stamps them as writers. Laughter sends up any office life. That may give it wider appeal and a longer run. But it deprives the play of depth...
...moment when she asked him as a nice middle class girl what was it like to be a prostitute and how did you actually pick up men, so he dressed her up and put her out on the sidewalk and he played her pimp. They howled with laughter over that, especially when she got a client. I think that was a lot of fun. But he also had a tendency to decapitate everybody after a certain point, decide they were unsuitable or not morally rigorous enough. He was always dropping his friends. One of the problems in writing the biography...
...then the husband committed suicide. Finally, we see the woodcutter's eyewitness version, in which Tajomaru fights with the husband at the wife's insistence, and the fight we see is anything but glamorous. It is a brawl between two frightened, panting men goaded by the woman's laughter and impugning of their manhood...
...most powerful man in the free world, J.F.K. took a phone call at his desk, listened, muffled the receiver and told a guest, "I am talking to the second most powerful man in the free world. Do you want to tell him anything?" More conversation, and Kennedy broke into laughter. "Bobby wants to know...