Word: clowning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...stricken, but rich in friends." They live in a squatter village near the beach, outside the normal realm of the world. They are always happy: always dancing, never hungry, never worried about what tomorrow will bring. This is a myth, after all; if Curio (Paco Sanches)--who wears a clown's makeup and sighs constantly after blondes--is slightly unbelievable, well, so is every other character in Bahia...
...funniest and most acid part of the book comes when Grant Parke, the clown of the otherwise uniformly self-serious group, meets Paris Green, the local Panther leader...
When George Carlin rose to fame in 1972 with his album "Class Clown," his route was not nearly as painful as Bruce's had been. While Carlin provokes some laughter on his record by poking fun at the Catholic, Church's elaborate dogma, the album as a whole seems to be oriented towards the innocuous and forgettable thesis, "Wasn't it fun to be a kid?" Carlin is certainly successful in making people laugh, but there is no catharsis in recalling All Those Great Jokes everybody used to pull in grade school--gags like "the artificial fart under...
...Andrew Sarris once described "a vague nostalgia for ancient aesthetic battles only dimly defined through the mists of memory." A case in point. However, Chagall's is a nostalgia that, while occasionally self-conscious (as in the slightly-too-charming. "L'Homme Au Parapluie," a line sketch of a clown leaning on an umbrella), is seldom oppressive. It is a nostalgia of both the whimsical and the heroic variety. Don-Quixote-with-a-palette battling that deadly variety of "Art for Art's sake" that produces wall-sized canvases of black on black that cost a hefty amount of green...
Philosopher Clown. This apparently obdurate optimism may have been Shaw's final put-on. As machine-gun bursts of talk reduce argument after argument to rubble in Man and Superman, one becomes more and more aware of the self-divided ambiguity of Shaw's nature. Just as he was a celibate husband, he was a plutocratic socialist, a religious atheist, an irrational rationalist, a philosopher clown, a meditative activist and a sexually emancipatory puritan...