Word: clownish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Though erratic and sometimes clownish, the wily Sihanouk is still popular in his country, particularly among the peasants. Because of his longtime residence in Peking he would probably not be acceptable to the Soviet Union as a compromise leader of the country, in the unlikely event that Hanoi could be persuaded to withdraw its forces from Cambodia. Last month Sihanouk announced the formation of a Confederation of Khmer Nationalists in exile, which was building its own armed forces. The Prince also said that he would attempt to establish a provisional government in Cambodia that would exclude backers of both...
...they are more truly on their own than they ever dreamed possible. Sometimes their fate is terrible. In A Distant Episode, a linguistics professor studying North African dialects stumbles foolishly into the hands of a gang of marauding nomads; they cut out his tongue and then teach him clownish tricks to perform at their revels. Other interlopers get gentler treatment. In Pastor Dowe at Tacaté, an ineffectual missionary is driven away from an Indian village by an act of generosity; local custom obliges him to accept a villager's seven-year-old daughter as his wife...
During his years at the State House, Connolly earned the reputation as a rhetorical "daffy"--an equally clownish counterpart to his opponent's melodramatic, bleeding politalk. One keen observer noted, "It's kind of like a high school election for class secretary...
...unfocused. Coming from Jerry Belson (Smile, TV's Dick Van Dyke Show), this is especially depressing. Belson wastes energy on repetitive slapstick bits that show the hero's bungled suicide attempts; The End's second half bogs down describing an unfunny friendship between Sonny and a clownish schizo (a mugging Dom DeLuise) whom he meets at a nuthouse. The film's characters and intentions are blurred and trivialized. What should have been a scabrous black comedy in the manner of Carl Reiner's Where's Poppa? devolves into a pointless, centrifugal cartoon...
...afterward, Rauschenberg made grass paintings?bundles of soil and plant matter held together with chicken wire, from which seedlings sprouted. (The last of these modest forerunners of earth art perished of cold and thirst in his loft down by the Fulton Street docks in 1954.) The results of this clownish exercise, as it looked then, would be of capital importance to modern...