“I didn’t hear what was said, but I laughed, because I was too embarrassed to embarrass him by breaking up his punch line and laughter by asking him to repeat it.”

“Who’s a** is this?” Mo asked...“Mine!” Mykel shouted.Mo stilled and then laughed. Mykel thought about what he said and then felt his face heat up from embarrassment. “I mean yours.” “God, I love you,” Mo said...”

“I answered that I was sure, and he asked me again, and this time I understood his concern. ‘I’m not embarrassed!’ I said, or at least tried to say, before recalling that embarazada means something entirely different to ‘embarrassed’ and that I’d just wailed at the doctor that I wasn’t pregnant, something his medical training had presumably made evident to him.”

“Very few conversations with Charles Dickens did not include a laugh from him. I had never met a man so given to laughter. Almost no moment or context was too serious for this author not to find some levity in it, as some of us had discovered to our embarrassment at funerals.”

“When I didn’t know him I punched him in the face. The best part about him is his nose.”

“There’s nothing funny about war. Well, aside from this joke Orafoura told me: What did WWI say to WWII? I wish I could tell you the punch line, but the restaurant was so noisy that I didn’t hear it. But I laughed anyway, because I’ll bet it was pretty funny.”