"Eigil Jensen wrote his very autobiographical short novel, Did Somebody Laugh?, as a sadly humorous story in 1940 and later dropped entirely out of literature. The book is about an unemployed young man's experiences in bread lines and worse during the Depression in the Copenhagen of the '30s. He is mild-mannered to the point of naivete. He keeps hoping for snow so that he can get a shovelling job. He has a few friends, one of them a cynic who steals books that the nameless protagonist gets some joy out of reading. He also has a brief love affair...but to her he is only a ship passing in the night....Turned out of his unpaid rented room, (he) goes to sleep on a park bench and dreams that a God-like unemployment agency official condemns him to a hell for the superfluous. Then he wakes up...and he is covered with snow....No big dramatic scenes, no regular action sequences, only poignant episodes, nobly photographed, played with controlled abandon by all hands, production-designed so that it does never look like anything but the real thing....Did Somebody Laugh? stresses the real tragedy of the Depression through concentration on the minor details of just general sadness." --Keith Keller, Variety