Boo,Hiss all you want, she woulda laughed.
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BTW, the scene where Helen as a young girl has this dramatic breakthrough from a water well. It never happened. At least Helen never said it did. That came from a dramatization of her life called “The Miracle Worker” which became a broadway play.
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Helen said it in her autobiography, which was adapted for the play.
Here’s a link to the 1914 edition of The Story of My Life. The story of the water well is on pages 23-24. The Miracle Worker wasn’t written until 1957.
Polly Thompson was Helen Keller’s companion and interpreter after Annie Sullivan was no longer able to work because of her age and her own problems with her eyesight. That particular picture upthread with Thompson may have been taken after Sullivan was dead.
FWIW, Keller did have more freedom after she had her Radcliffe degree, and was so much in the public eye, and her autobiography had been serialized, so she was making some of her own money. But since Sullivan had known her since she was a pretty young child, it was probably hard to think of her as an adult-- like it is for parents. Polly Thompson never knew Keller as a child, and probably treated her differently from the way Sullivan did.
An another subject, I have known Deaf-blind people, several people born Deaf who later became blind, and two people born both Deaf and blind, as well as one person born blind who later lost her hearing. They all laughed. I used to work as a sign language interpreter, and I had a Deaf-blind interpreter-guide endorsement. I even went to a National Federation of the Blind convention once as an interpreter, and while I never actually met Helen Keller herself, my guess, even before I saw the posted picture was that she laughed.
I have known hundreds of Deaf people, many of them born Deaf. They all laughed in a way that sounded pretty much the way hearing people laugh. The only thing they didn’t do was the “Polite laugh,” when someone told a joke that wasn’t really funny.
So, she’s on the right?
Actually, she was so far left she shaded into red. 
Quite true; she wrote several published pieces opining that the US should be more supportive of the fledgling Soviet Union, and considered herself a socialist most of her life. She was also a suffragist on the more radical end of the continuum.
You know your HK history.
Well I dont have a way to find an actual source but from what I read “The Story of My Life” had alot of editing to make it more dramatic, partly at the insistence of her friend Mark Twain. I’m sure the well thing did happen but it wasnt nearly as dramatic as her book says because Twain and others told elevate the experience to make a better story.
Thing is and whats not discussed is that Helen’s father was a former Confederate Army officer and Anne Sullivan was a Yankee and those 2 had long fights about issues related to the Civil War and after 2 years he stopped paying her so Anne needed another source of income and Helen was it. She made her money by making appearances.
I think she accidentally introduced sex to her by allowing her to read a novel in braille which had a sex scene in it and it was Anne who Helen asked “What’s this about?”. Anne was also married for awhile and Helen would ask her what the bumping in the other bedroom was all about and why Anne seemed “different” the next morning.
Wait…tell me why you framed your OP question here as a question about Helen Keller?
So far everybody seems on board with an appreciation of innate<–>sensorium<–>learned behavior which is unwarranted or extremely loose.
ETA: Eventually we’ll progress from the hero of Trumbo’s *Johnny Got His Gun * to a Frenchman’s head in a jar…
That is odd, now that I think about it. HK could hear and see until she was 19 months, as has already been pointed out, but at any rate, I can tell you personally that even very retarded people with no language, who have been impaired since birth, will laugh when tickled. Ability to laugh /= sense of humor. Also, there are people who are born with a type of facial paralysis and lack the ability to smile, have impaired, but not absent speech, still laugh, although their laugh sounds odd, and isn’t accompanied by the “right” facial expressions, nonetheless still have senses of humor. They can explain why a cartoon is funny, make jokes themselves (they aren’t intellectually impaired), and the right places in their brain light up when they watch something funny.
There’s a neurosurgery now that can help these people have a smile-- it’s not especially expressive, but it’s better than having a blank face in response to other people, which is socially really difficult for children with this condition.
She felt the vibrations through the floor or wall? Anne and her husband must have been pretty vigorous, or had a very rickety bed!
I think Urbanredneck was joking, but Deaf-blind people really do have acute sense of vibrations, because they aren’t overwhelmed by sights and sounds. I had a friend who could tell, when we were riding in the car, whether I had turned the radio on, or that it had suddenly started raining heavily, even over the other vibrations of what was a pretty old car.
Havent you ever lived in an apartment building? It doesnt take an acute sense of vibrations to feel what’s going on. I also have heard that some blind people can identify people simply by the sound they make when they walk. No reason Helen could not have become pretty good at picking up vibrations since along with touch, taste, and smell were the only senses she had left
No I wasnt joking. It was something I read that Helen could occasionally experience. Remember they all traveled together and stayed in connected bedrooms in hotels. I’d imagine if you asked your dead/blind friends about such things they would also tell you about “clues” like vibrations or be able to pick up cues from people about their emotional state. Maybe they can also smell pheromones?
I’ve lived in apartments for the past 27 years, as well as stayed in lots of cheap hotels. Sure, you can hear people getting in on next door, but to actually feel vibrations you have to be in a pretty flimsily constructed building, or the couple have to be going at it like rabid wolverines.
Because everyone would instantly know what condition that I was talking about. Besides, I don’t know much about Helen Keller, I’m curious.
You have a mistaken definition of ‘Everybody’; I am trying to avoid any confusion.
No, ‘we’ won’t; watch and learn.
Well think about buildings built in the 19th century with all wood floors.