Word: mirth
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From the Communists there was smug mirth. Their press mocked America's "atomaniacs." In Italy, pro-Soviet Socialist Leader Pietro Nenni (just back from a 15-day junket to another "peace" congress in Moscow) proudly pinpointed the site of the explosion in "eastern Siberia." In the town of Santeramo near Bari, Communists got the news in the middle of the night, raced in nightshirts and dressing gowns to a hasty rally where a speaker promised: "We Communists will have our headquarters at the White House! Washington shall be ours...
MacArthur thinks he can wipe the smile off little Nozaka's face. This much is certain: the Communists would have far greater cause for mirth if Douglas MacArthur had never come to Japan...
...thinks of what the ASPCA said about the "balance of nature." The natural habitat of the bird owl is the Harvard Yard, and to take him away for a winter in the suburbs would upset a delicate scale. Then he puts his foot in his mouth and chokes with mirth when he things of those pigeons and squirrels...
...coveys to the relative freedom of college life. In college, however, they found a juvenile competitive society exactly suited to put them back where they came from. Says he: "I can still shiver with humiliation over slights remembered for thirty-odd years, and warm at the memory of unforgettable mirth," or of his more rakish classmates with "their tiny straw hats with negligible brims, and voluminous white ducks under neat little coats whose tails scarcely cover [their] waistbands...
...more minor entries in the life after death derby is "The Cockeyed Miracle," into which somebody lured Keenan Wynn and Frank Mergan. The supposedly whimsical situations that were only mildly funny back in the days of "Topper" are beginning to age just a bit. No longer is unchecked mirth provoked by the familiar business of having characters invisible to their fellows on the screen, yet conveniently apparent to the audience, walking through walls and evening thunderstorms. All this is involved in a trail tale about an old gentle man who dies and insists upon staying around a while longer...