This narration becomes the audio track for a set of actors, who perform the story, lip-synching all the dialogue verbatim, complete with giggles, cursing, and nervous pauses.
Picking up on this barbed make-'em-laugh spirit, Ms. Streep's line readings recall comics as far-flung as Lucille Ball, Sophie Tucker, Henny Youngman and — in the "heh-heh-heh" chuckles with which she fills nervous pauses — Beavis and Butthead.
Westhoven was nervous, taking long pauses and shaking -- which apparently signaled criminality.
Pregnant pauses, nervous laughter, dad makes a fumbling segue to a new conversation, and you wonder why you agree to put up with the guy every year.
The president wore the school's colors — blue suit, orange blouse — and spoke cautiously when I asked her the question that had everyone speculating all summer: Why was she pushed out? "I don't know," Sullivan said, filling an awkward pause with nervous laughter, casting a glance at the university spokeswoman, Carol Wood.
Some of Jesus' admonitions would seem to me to perhaps make some wealthy people nervous, and to give pause to many of the self-professed Christians who invoke their faith in judging others.
The teller's tone, the pregnant pauses, the nervous chuckles, the tension during the buildup to something shocking or funny or awe-inspiring or tragic... these are what distinguish the stories of the Moth.
One of the many speakers was so nervous that she had to pause in the midst of denouncing the people who would be meeting "behind the closed and heavily militarized doors of the Waldorf-Astoria".
"Ah, there it is," he says, pausing in his nervous ramble around the cavernous Palmieri Foods bottling plant in New Haven.
