Word: clowning
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...elephantine gestures and TV-sized jokes. As he runs into the fadeout, a passing hippie asks him where he is going. "I don't know," Sellers answers. "There must be someplace." The line sums up both this meandering movie and the flickering career of a gifted clown who has talent to burn but no taste in scripts...
...FIRST act we did was the three clowns. It was all comedy that we were doing, hitting each other with broomsticks, and they'd pull the pants off me and I had a dress underneath that flared out this way here, and big rubber sponges for muscles on the thighs and the calves of the legs. It was a very funny act, it was a scream. It lasted for a constant eight or nine minutes; it didn't stop a second. From there on, I get tired of it after a while. Meanwhile, one of the acrobats that was with...
...about to burn, maim or kill a dozen Negro orphans. Behind the injected element of fashionable social consciousness lies a cornball ro mance about the orphans' surrogate mother (Shirley Jones) and her erratic spouse (Jack Cassidy), who went off to play Hamlet and ended up as a circus clown. Shirley Jones looks decorative, and Cassidy is an inexhaustibly beguiling entertainer, but the scenes they have to play are sentimental postcards in need of falling snow. The trouble is that the show won't last until winter...
...visual humor is often more original than the verbal kind. True, the show's basic gag, endlessly repeated, is throwing a pail of water at an endlessly unsuspecting girl-as simple as Punch being whacked over the head or a clown being squirted with Seltzer water, and somehow disarmingly innocent. Periodically, a bikini-clad girl is shown dancing the boogaloo; then the camera moves in to reveal that the girl is painted head to feet with silly graffiti. Other sight gags are madly literal-minded or engagingly sly. When the announcer calls for a station break, the camera will...
When antiwar hecklers interrupted him outside Cleveland, the Vice President dismissed them as "damn fools." He introduced Emmett Kelly, the clown, as "Nixon's campaign manager and economic adviser." Pointing to a nearby statue of William McKinley, he sniped: "That represents as much forward movement as the opposition's ever had." When Humphrey loosed a fusillade at Nixon during an A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention in Minneapolis, a happy worker bellowed: "Give 'em hell, Hubie!" Answered the Vice President: "What do you think I'm doing...