Word: mirthfulness
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...strange echo introduces the final portion of Rochester's life: "In the sixties there had been a time for mirth; now in the seventies was a time for seriousness." Rochester's satires had earned him the reputation of, as he wrote, "a man whom it is the great mode to hate." His two great loves, wine and women, finally turned on him so that by 1677 he was almost blind. In 1680 he died--either of tertiary syphilis or delirium tremens--disgraced for alleged cowardice on the dueling field, and accused of having thugs beat up Dryden, England's poet...
British Playwright Tom Stoppard chain-smokes ideas like cigarettes and emits the smoke with puffs of mirth. The latest display of his intellectual curiosity, verbal agility and quirky sense of humor is Jumpers (TIME, March 11), a comedy currently on view at Manhattan's Billy Rose Theater. Jumpers is a philosophical roller coaster careering dizzyingly along the parallel tracks of wit and logic over such subjects as the existence or nonexistence of God, the nature of good and evil, and the interdependence of ethics and metaphysics...
...Senate's self-appointed constitutional watchdog, Ervin, for all of his courtliness and mirth, approaches his investigation with a relentless seriousness. He told TIME'S Neil MacNeil last week: "As. an American who loves his country and venerates the institution of the presidency, I indulge the presumption that the President has no connection with the Watergate affair or its coverup. Candor compels me to say that the President is making it very difficult to entertain this presumption if he withholds from the committee the records and the tapes which I believe contain information which is relevant to establish...
...therapeutic penance roughly comparable to a dose of cod-liver oil. All such gentry will be dazzled, enlightened and elated by Nicol Williamson's Late Show. Williamson looks like a kind of carbonated El Greco. He has a taut elongated body and funereal brows-yet an effervescent mirth, irony, mischief and intelligence emanate from every tone and gesture of this remarkable actor. In a limited engagement, after each evening's Broadway performance in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, he unwinds in poetry and song off-Broadway...
Darcy Pulliam's Tessa and Kathryn Karrassik's Gianetta Are full-voiced and saucy young wives. Pulliam handles each line with a timing that's fine, Dropping each so the greatest mirth thrives...