Word: clowning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...days Teamsters' Organizer Baker answered questions while the heat from overhead television lamps sent sweat from his pomaded hair down his neck into a wilted white collar that flapped outside his tentlike coat. His lawyers had urged him to take the Fifth Amendment. But Baker decided to clown his way through a performance aimed at concealing a grimly important fact: Barney Baker is just the sort of specimen used by his friend and employer, Teamsters' President James Hoffa, to control the nation's biggest, most predatory union...
...Colonel (Columbia) clothes Danny Kaye, hailed as "the world's greatest clown" by his pressagents and some critics not on the payroll, in a seedy business suit and black Homburg, and tints his hair middle-aged grey. Not a prat in the whole picture falls, and not one double-talked song or double-sung talk issues from the Silly Putty that is Kaye's usual movie face. The result of this hold-down of his celebrated talents is the most appealing and one of the funniest films Danny Kaye has ever made...
...Talent Scout Tom O'Malley calls to announce that old Prizefighter-Clown Maxie Rosenbloom will be available for the night's show. "Tell Rosenbloom to be himself," Jack warns. "No prepared jokes." The warning is hardly necessary. Responsible for signing most of the guests on Paar's show, O'Malley is well aware of the rules of the game. Forbidden are "Lindy" comedians-the brash, Berle-type gagsters given to dialect jokes and continuous excitement. Says Paar: "I'm not interested in comedians named Joey or Jackie-no rock 'n' roll, no jazz...
...near the end of his life, ether (he died at 34). At the theater he wore a dirty white canvas suit and a makeshift paper shirt with the tie painted on in India ink. He was, said Gide, "an incredible figure . . . plaster-faced . . . gotten up like a circus clown and acting a fantastic, strenuously contrived role which showed no human characteristic." He often carried firearms. Once he was shooting the tops off champagne bottles lined up against a wall behind which some children were playing. Their mother hurried over to complain that her children might be shot. "If that should...
...Shakespeare's weakest comic passages; and, on the stage, it usually proves to be an embarrassing interlude. For the first time in my experience, thanks to Frederic Warriner's Launcelot and Stanley Jay's Gobbo, the scene came out satisfactorily. Warriner, in an outlandish patch-work costume, turns the clown into a merry stutterer; and Jay sports an over-sized pointed nose and few teeth. Their combined antics are hilarious...