Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...This is not the way I pictured it," her frustration gets a mounting laugh. At the climax, her staccato pleadings fuse into an aria of justified rage and saintly forgiveness toward the limits imposed on her by life and by her loved ones. Abruptly, spectators who were crying with laughter are simply crying, without any sense of being manipulated. The ability to find humor in unlikely places, then shift emotional gears with no machinery showing, makes Simon a great comedist...
...like those from the gulf war and the thrift bailout, could again postpone that day indefinitely. Last week Bush told several thousand businessmen and -women in New York City that the deficit would be "virtually eliminated by 1995." The audience reaction was a mix of scattered applause and derisive laughter. As one of Bush's predecessors put it, you can't fool all of the people all the time...
LUCY & DESI: BEFORE THE LAUGHTER (CBS, Feb. 10, 9 p.m. EST). Frances Fisher and Maurice Benard, winners of CBS's anyone-can-star contest, play the former First Couple of Comedy in a TV movie about their "loving but stormy" marriage...
...Jane Austen's estate, even at this minute [laughter]. There really is no strict definition of what is going too far with parody. Parody is generally okay, but characters are trade marked, they're not copyrighted. And we actually had Bambi with bullets around her neck and we took the skunk and made it into a cigar-chomping sergeant, and that's stuff we probably couldn't have done. It would have been interesting to test the case, but not with our own money...
PATRIMONY by Philip Roth (Simon & Schuster; $19.95). The trick of this account of how the author cared for his dying father is that there is no trick, only a masterly demonstration of narrative control and emotional clarity that can evoke laughter and tears -- sometimes simultaneously...