Come the bell, the upstart nervelessly played it cool, almost a laughingly gay matador, his speed of hand and foot totally nullifying Liston's wicked jab, the key to his armoury.
And then there was a laughingly embarrassing company called America Online, which acted as if the Internet was fast food and could be packaged and peddled like a Big Mac and was based in decidedly unchic Dulles, Va.
Jennie Somogyi, a City Ballet principal who played Marie as a child, laughingly described her former teacher as being like a friend, only "you were still afraid of her".
Saw a post on a Facebook dog page, supposedly humorous, where a woman laughingly described how her dog was completely neurotic, anxious, dominant, obsessive, and could never be re-homed if necessary because he was so out of control.
A friend laughingly tells X that he'd never dream of working as an adjunct, because "adjuncts work for the pleasure of feeling important and being called professor".
In Glaspell's "Trifles," for instance, men trying to solve a murder laughingly dismiss the neighbor women's housewifely concerns and thus never learn that the clues to the case lie in a sewing basket.
That's an almost laughingly daunting goal.
Peter Duffy, the paterfamilias, is an agnostic logician of Irish Catholic descent, while his wife, Zipporah Zangwill, an anthropologist, laughingly classifies her family as "lace curtain Jewish," meaning that "we don't say 'lapsed.' Our word for it is 'reformed.' " The Duffys raise their five children (a sixth dies in childhood) ecumenically, but all react strongly to their double heritage.
About a year ago, taking my design thinking lessons to heart, I decided to undertake an (almost laughingly) informal poll about the product I had been piloting and iterating all along: me.
"Make a profit," a younger Romney laughingly says in the attack film financed by supporters of Newt Gingrich.
"If I had a choice," Bonds had laughingly said a day earlier in response to a question, "I would take the home run record.
