This is a production that arouses laughter but does not then make it stick in the throat.
During his general discussion of invention he also considers the successive, formal parts of a speech, including a lively chapter on the art of arousing laughter.
"It was very hostile," the mayor joked yesterday at a news conference in describing this year's negotiations, arousing laughter from the Council members assembled, before one Council member joked about a "kinder, gentler" mayor.
For instance, one resource for the insecure is to become a joker, to get attention by arousing laughter, by mocking those in authority or pretending not to care, and I have known teams refuse to go along with such actions or playacting, refraining from laughter at the individual's indiscipline or shenanigans, and refusing to be cowed by the latter's arrogance.
If we're more sensitive than ever, as a society, to sexual abuse of all sorts, it's precisely because the subject of sex is a matter of public discourse and representations of all sorts, high and low; if our tolerance for violence is lower than ever, it's because the horror of it, even when it arouses laughter (see "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"), is presented more overtly than ever.
Jesus, he argues, "did not have to employ such foolish things to point out the strait and narrow path," and "Nothing in his parables arouses laughter".
Tintinnabula, meanwhile, were designed not to attract the viewer but to ward off evil, sometimes by arousing raucous laughter but often something more sinister.
Philosopher George Moore struggling to write his lecture justifying the existence of God and the possibility of goodness still arouses sympathetic laughter; the notion of his showbiz wife, Dotty, that the moon-landings will expose our moral absolutes as "local customs of another place" seems whimsically quaint.
In Mr. Rivera's play -- produced by the MCC Theater under Lisa Peterson's direction -- the audience is caught in the dream, in which a parade of bondage, rape, torture, mutilation, murder, treason and civil war, accompanied by the music and rhythms of flamenco, arouses the uneasy laughter of confusion.
BMX XXX was the nadir, partly because, unlike most of the other ideas, it actually happened – even if its primitive 3D graphics were unlikely to arouse anything but mocking laughter.
According to Trissino, laughter is aroused by objects that are in some way ugly and especially by that from which better qualities were hoped.
